64 


STELLIGERI 

AND 

OTHER    ESSAYS    CONCERNING 

AMERICA 


7.V   UNIFORM  BISDIXG. 
ANDREW    LANG. 

Letters  to  Dead  Authors,     -       -       -  $1   00 

AUGUSTINE    BIRRELL. 

Obiter  Dicta— First  Series,         -       -     1   00 
Obiter  Dicta— Second  Series,    -  1   00 

W.  E.   HENLEY. 

Views  and  Reviews — Literature,       -     1   00 

BARRETT    WENDELL. 

Stelligeri  and  other  Essays,        -       -     1    25 


•STELLIGERI 


OTHER   ESSAYS 


CONCERNING 


AMERICA 

«^» 


BARRETT   WENDELL 


Of   THE 

UNIVERSITY 

OF 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1893 


5 


COPYRIGHT,    1893,   BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 


TROW   DIRECTORY 
PRINTING   AND   BOOKBIND.NQ  CO* 


IN 
STELLIGERORUM 

/Ifcemorfam 

They  came  ha  youthful  ardour  here,  where  we 
Follow  their  footsteps.    Here  like  us  they  playeJ 
And  worked  ;  like  us  had  follies,  that  dismayed 

Their  shaven  elders.    Hence  exultantly 

Like  us  they  encountered  life,  eager  to  see 
Its  prizes  theirs.    Unperfect,  brave,  they  made 
OUT  poor  world  better.    Like  them,  unafraid, 

May  we  at  last  merge  in  eternity. 

From  out  their  old  New  England,  still  pure 
( )t'  foreign  taint,  where  in  their  dreamy  past 
They  stand  heroic,  conies  the  courage  now 
That  nerves  us  for  tho  conflict  we  must  know. 
What  nobler  prize  for  who  the  trial  endure 
Than  place  in  their  companionship  at  last  ? 

Harvard  College.,  1893 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 

I.  STELLIGERI 1 

II.  THE  FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES  .        .  21 

III.  SOME  NEGLECTED  CHARACTERISTICS  OP 

THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS     .        .  45 

IV.  WERE  THE  SALEM  WITCHES  GUILTLESS  ?  03 
V.  AMERICAN  LITERATURE   ....  91 

VI.  JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER  .        .        .  147 

VII.  MR.  LOWELL  AS  A  TEACHER  .  203 


211784 


I 

STELLIGERI 


STELLIGERI 


A  FEW  years  ago  the  authorities  of  Harvard 
University  made  in  their  quinquennial  catalogue 
a  change  which  has  generally  commended  itself 
to  modern  good  sense.  For  the  first  time  they 
wrote  it  in  English.  Changes  in  this  catalogue 
have  quite  as  much  precedent  as  uniformity. 
Only  ten  years  before,  the  quinquennial  catalogue 
had  been  a  triennial.  And  they  say  that  no  two 
numbers  had  ever  possessed  quite  the  same 
characteristics  of  form  and  arrangement.  But  un 
til  1890,  all  these  official  lists  of  those  whom  Har 
vard  College — or  Harvard  University,  as  nowadays 
they  prefer  to  call  it — had  educated  or  honoured, 
had  in  common  one  trait  that  is  now  definitely  a 
thing  of  the  past.  They  were  written,  from  be 
ginning  to  end,  in  something  that  passed  for 
Latin. 

No  doubt  there  was  obvious  absurdity  in  offi 
cially  naming  an  every-day  Yankee  Johannes  or 
Jacobus  ;  or  in  translating  such  abnormal  Chris 
tian  names  as  that  of  Increase  Mather  into  bar 
barous  terms  like  Crcsccntius.  The  absurdity  of 


4  STELLIGEKI 

similarly  Latinizing  surnames — an  absurdity  dis 
carded  ever  so  many  years  ago — was  no  greater. 
No  doubt,  equally,  the  long  strings  of  incompre 
hensible  Latin  abbreviations  which  used  to  follow 
the  names  of  distinguished  alumni  were  very 
ridiculous.  But  to  many  of  us  the  absurdity 
seemed  lovably  harmless  ;  and  with  it  went  one 
or  two  phrases  that  some  of  us  are  sorry  to  lose. 

Chief  among  these,  perhaps,  was  the  sonorous 
little  sentence  that  used  to  close  the  numerical 
summary  of  Harvard  men.  The  total  number  was 
given  first ;  then,  formally  subtracted  from  it, 
came  the  number  of  the  dead.  In  the  class  lists 
the  names  of  the  dead  were  prefixed  by  asterisks. 
In  the  final  summary,  the  number  of  the  dead 
was  defined  thus  :  E  vivis  cesserunt  stelligeri. — 
They  that  bear  the  stars  have  passed  from  among  the 
living.  One  did  not  read  the  sentence  often.  Some 
of  us  looked  at  it  so  seldom  that  I  have  heard  it 
honestly  misquoted  in  a  far  more  dogmatic  form  : 
Ex  his  stelligeri  in  ccelum  processerunt . — Of  these 
they  that  hear  the  stars  have  passed  forth  into  the 
heavens.  Stelligeri  was  the  fatal  word.  To  all  of 
us  who  cared  for  the  old  catalogues,  the  dead  men 
of  Harvard  were  always  stelligeri — they  that  hear  the 
stars.  And  some  of  us  had  a  sentimental  way  of 
looking  at  the  skies  of  a  clear  night,  with  a  half- 
phrased  feeling  that  their  faint,  twinkling,  lasting 
glory  had  something  to  do  with  our  college  mates 
who  were  gone  before  us.  For  did  not  the  cata- 


STELLIGEEI  5 

logue  say  so  ?  It  was  a  pleasantly  childish  fancy 
which  made  those  who  yielded  to  it  sometimes 
feel  more  akin  than  usual  to  the  old  worlds  of 
youthful  humanity  which  the  colleges  and  univer 
sities  once  kept  so  much  in  mind.  I  have  not 
had  the  heart  to  look  for  what  our  dead  men 
are  called  now — "  deceased,"  perhaps,  or  "no 
longer  living."  *  At  all  events,  they  are  no  longer 
stelligeri, — which  I  am  informed,  by  the  way,  was 
never  classical  Latin. 

The  change  came  none  too  soon.  Harvard 
College,  to  be  sure,  has  always  been  true  to  what 
remains  its  oldest  and  strongest  tradition — that 
every  man  and  every  generation  has  an  inalien 
able  right  to  think.  Thereby  the  men  and  the 
generations  make  their  conclusions — no  matter 
how  orthodox — impregnably  their  own.  The  deep 
conservatism  which  has  preserved  this  heretical 
tradition  for  above  two  centuries  has  resulted  in 
a  good  many  superficial  changes  meanwhile.  The 
first  conclusion  arrived  at  by  people  who  do  their 
own  thinking  is  generally  that  their  immediate 
predecessors  have  been  seriously  mistaken.  And 
the  Harvard  of  one  generation  has  almost  always 
been  a  perceptibly  different  place  from  the  Har 
vard  of  the  next.  The  unparalleled  growth  of 
the  college  during  the  past  twenty  years,  however, 
has  made  the  most  marked  change  in  its  history. 

*  Since  writing  this  I  have  looked,  and  find  them  *'  Re 
ported  as  deceased." 


6  STELLIGERI 

The  old  graduates — stdligeri — belonged  to  classes 
small  enough  and  submitted  to  systems  of  instruc 
tion  similar  enough  to  make  them  in  a  sense  all 
friends,  with  a  hundred  traditions  and  memories  in 
common.  Nowadays,  when  every  Freshman  class 
is  bigger  than  the  whole  college  was  fifty  years  ago, 
and  when  every  man  meets  the  elective  system  at 
the  college  threshold,  everything  is  altered.  One 
cannot  say  for  the  worse :  most  of  us  who  know 
modern  Harvard  well  think  it  a  far  better  place 
than  the  old.  But  it  is  not  the  same.  We  have 
discarded  no  end  of  useless  things  and  phrases ; 
we  have  introduced  no  end  of  useful  ones  ;  we  are 
striving  to  know  and  to  preserve  the  truth  with 
as  much  eagerness  as  any  who  have  gone  before. 
In  every  superficial  way,  though,  our  experience 
is  utterly  different  from  that  of  our  elders.  The 
authorities  might  have  kept  the  old  forms.  They 
might  have  called  us,  in  our  time,  stelligeri  too. 
But  we  could  never  have  been  the  real  thing. 


II 


A  TYPICAL  evidence  of  what  the  real  thing  was 
lately  came  to  me.  A  kinswoman  on  her  death 
bed  sent  me  as  a  farewell  greeting  the  record  of 
his  class  which  her  father,  dead  these  thirty  years, 
had  kept  from  admission  to  college  until  the  end  of 
his  life.  It  is  in  a  small,  leather-bound  note-book, 
with  thick,  old-fashioned  leaves.  It  begins  with 


STELLIGERI  7 

an  alphabetic  list  of  the  class  as  they  entered 
college.  A  series  of  simple  hieroglyphics  in 
dicates  "who  attained  the  supreme  glory  of  the 
Porcellian  Club,  who  belonged  to  the  Hasty 
Pudding,  who  to  the  Phi  Beta  Kappa,  who 
dropped  out  of  college,  and  so  on.  Then  come 
pages  of  notes  as  to  the  professions  the  men 
took  up,  whom  they  married,  how  many  children 
they  had,  and  in  general  what  became  of  them ; 
then  pages  into  which  are  pasted  clippings  from 
the  newspapers,  generally  eulogistic  and  frequent 
ly  obituary.  The  last  bears  a  date  forty-eight 
years  after  graduation,  and  only  a  few  weeks  before 
the  faithful  recorder  died.  He  did  not  live  to  see 
his  college  jubilee. 

Provincial,  even  trivial,  these  records  may  seem. 
If  I  remember  rightly,  the  most  eminent  of  all  the 
fifty  or  sixty  men  they  concern  was  one  who  for  a 
few  years  became  a  sober  local  dignitary.  They 
tell  little  of  character,  anyway,  beyond  the  fact 
that  a  rather  surprising  number  of  the  class 
seem  to  have  been  afflicted  with  insanity  or  in 
sane  wives.  In  cold  blood,  one  cannot  call  the 
little  volume  much  more  than  a  record  of  names 
and  dates.  And  yet  I  have  seen  few  books  which 
affect  me  as  less  prosaic.  These  dry  records  were 
kept  unremittingly  for  above  half  a  century  by  a 
loyal  Harvard  man  who  longed  to  have  always  be 
fore  him  every  little  fact  that  transpired  about 
the  college  and  the  college  men  of  his  time.  In 


8  STELLIGEEI 

substance,  they  were  almost  as  formal  as  the  firm, 
slow  handwriting  in  which  they  were  traced.  In 
essence,  one  felt,  every  stroke  of  the  fine  pen  was 
loving. 

The  men  these  records  concerned  were  almost 
all  native  Yankees  of  the  old  stock.  In  later  life 
by  far  the  greater  part  of  them  were  honourable 
and  useful  citizens — divines,  lawyers,  physicians, 
merchants,  teachers.  It  is  some  years  now  since 
the  last  survivor  died.  Every  one,  I  think,  was 
written  down  stelliger. 

There  was  little  time  to  send  an  answer  for  this 
gift.  Yet  I  tried  more  than  once  to  phrase  an 
answer  that  should  tell  all  it  meant.  Finally,  in 
despair  of  expressing  the  thing  literally,  I  tried  to 
make  some  verses ;  that  effort,  it  seemed,  might 
tell  more  than  any  formal  phrases  of  the  emotion 
I  had  to  convey.  The  verses,  though  rather  lame 
and  halting,  served  '  their  purpose.  My  kins 
woman  sent  back  word  that  they  were  welcome. 
She  had  loved  the  old  Harvard  traditions,  too. 
At  her  death,  a  few  weeks  later,  it  was  reported 
that  she  had  bequeathed  to  the  college,  in  memory 
of  her  father,  a  small  foundation  for  an  annual 
lecture  on  the  immortality  of  the  soul. 

Ill 

THE  verses  thus  written  I  have  used  for  the  dedi 
cation  of  this  little  book.  That  they  were  made 


STELLIGERI  9 

for  so  widely  different  a  purpose  is  one  reaaon 
why  I  have  liked  to  use  them  here.  The  essays 
of  which  the  book  is  made  were  written  indepen 
dently,  with  no  thought  of  collection,  and  little 
that  they  had  anything  in  common.  It  was  only 
when  they  were  all  done  that  I  began  to  see  how 
they  belong  together. 

The  reminiscences  of  Mr.  Lowell  were  written 
first.  When  he  died,  people  did  not  half  appre 
ciate  what  his  professional  work  as  a  teacher  had 
been.  So  I  wrote  down  what  I  remembered  of  it, 
as  the  best  tribute  I  could  pay  his  memory.  At  the 
time  I  did  not  sign  it,  because  at  such  a  moment 
the  obtrusion  of  an  unknown  name  seems  to  me 
impertinent.  What  any  reader  cared  for  was  not 
who  might  have  written  this  tribute,  but  what  the 
tribute  might  add  to  those  already  paid  the  mem 
ory  of  a  man  who  had  lived  to  be  the  unques 
tioned  head  of  American  letters.  That  objection, 
I  think,  need  not  stand  in  my  way  now.  In  sub 
stance,  the  paper  belongs  with  the  others  ;  and  in 
a  collection  of  one's  own  work,  it  would  be  silly  to 
assume  one's  self  unknown  in  such  sense  as  must 
be  the  case  when  one's  occasional  writing  chances 
to  be  accepted  by  an  established  magazine. 

The  other  papers  in  this  book  are  all  occasional, 
in  the  conventional  sense  of  the  word.  They 
wore  written  to  be  read  or  presented  at  formal 
meetings.  In  1891  I  was  asked  to  tell  the  Ameri 
can  Historical  Association  as  much  as  I  could 


10  STELLIGERI 

read  in  twenty  minutes  of  what  I  thought  about 
the  New  England  Puritans.  A  little  later  I  was 
asked  to  address  the  meeting  held  by  the  Essex 
Institute,  at  Salem,  in  commemoration  of  the 
two  hundredth  anniversary  of  the  issuing  of  war 
rants  against  the  witches.  In  the  autumn  of 
1892  I  was  asked  to  address  the  Public  Schools 
of  Worcester,  on  the  four  hundredth  anniversary 
of  the  Discovery  of  America.  A  little  later  I  was 
invited  to  give  a  formal  lecture  on  American 
Literature  at  Vassar  College.  And  when  Mr. 
Whittier  died,  the  American  Academy  of  Arts  and 
Sciences  invited  me  to  write  the  memoir  of  him 
for  their  Proceedings. 

Some  such  statement  as  this  was  almost  neces 
sary  to  explain  the  differences  of  form  and  man 
ner  among  these  papers.  One  does  not  write  for 
school  children  in  quite  the  way  that  one  falls 
into  when  addressing  a  learned  society  ;  and  one's 
personal  reminiscences  can  hardly  be  phrased  in 
such  style  as  one  unconsciously  assumes  when 
making  a  university  lecture.  These  natural  di 
vergences  of  style  and  temper,  then,  made  me  at 
first  think  of  these  papers  as  separate  things. 
Then,  as  I  turned  them  over,  I  began  to  see  that 
among  them  they  had  gone  far  to  express,  from 
different  points  of  view,  certain  opinions  about 
American  life,  past  and  present,  that  I  was  glad 
to  have  formulated.  In  collecting  the  papers, 
however,  I  was  not  sorry  that  their  style  is  not 


STELLIGERI  11 

uniform.  Its  very  irregularity  will  go  as  far  as 
anything  can  to  disclaim  the  assumption,  which 
always  seems  inherent  in  print,  that  one's  views 
are  final.  What  I  have  written  here  is  only  what 
I  have  grown  to  think  during  thirteen  years  of 
academic  teaching — a  mode  of  life  dangerously 
remote  from  practical  experience,  but  perhaps 
more  favorable  than  that  to  observation.  What  I 
have  said  is  shown,  by  its  very  diversity  of  form, 
to  be  only  an  expression  of  what  an  individual 
who  has  little  to  do  with  active  life  has  come  to 
think. 


IV 


IN  brief,  it  seems  to  me  that  the  America  of 
the  past  resembles,  in  more  ways  than  one,  the 
stelligeri  of  Harvard.  It  is  a  thing  we  shall  not 
see  again ;  we  love  to  think  about  it  and  to  cherish 
its  traditions ;  and  if  we  drop  love — using  our  heads 
and  not  our  hearts — we  find  it  on  scrutiny  not 
altogether  so  imposing  as  we  like  to  imagine  it. 
For  it  was  not  divine  but  human ;  and  the  only 
thing  that  can  make  humanity  godlike  is  unvio- 
lated  tradition. 

In  a  certain  sense,  we  may  say  that  hitherto  the 
history  of  America  has  been  that  of  a  great  na 
tional  inexperience.  This  does  not  mean,  of 
course,  that  human  life  has  not  existed  here  in 
all  its  real  complexity.  It  means  that  hitherto 


12  STELLIGERI 

our  communities  have  generally  been  so  far  from 
overcrowded,  and  our  people  so  free  to  make  their 
way  whither  they  would  and  could,  that  in 
America  the  material  problems  of  life  have  pre 
sented  themselves  less  regularly  than  in  Europe. 
So  hitherto  we  have  been  naturally  disposed  on 
the  one  hand  to  over-estimate  small  merit  and 
petty  success,  and  on  the  other  to  display  our 
vices  in  forms  which,  however  deplorable  on  a 
moral  scale,  still  have  in  them  something  of 
youthful  naughtiness  as  distinguished  from  ma 
ture  rascality. 

The  race  to  which  these  generations  of  inex 
perience  were  coming  met  them  with  a  dogmatic 
creed  actually  based  on  such  experience  of  human 
frailty  and  wickedness  as  must  always  be  the  lot 
of  any  dense  society.  Creeds  long  survive  expe 
rience.  The  dogmas  of  Calvinism  were  uttered 
for  generations  in  communities  where,  in  normal 
moods,  they  could  not  seem  exhaustively  true. 
A  certain  unconscious  divergence  between  state 
ments  and  facts  followed,  as  a  national  character 
istic.  It  grew  until  our  freer  minds  flung  the 
old  dogmas  away,  trying  to  make  new  and  better 
ones  of  their  own. 

The  new  dogmas,  which  in  brief  rest  on  the  as 
sumption  that  human  nature  is  perfectible,  are  a 
great  deal  more  inspiring  than  the  old  that  harp 
so  on  depravity.  What  is  more,  they  are  a  good 
deal  more  true  to  the  national  inexperience  of 


STELLIGEKI  13 

America  than  were  the  old  ones.  But  they  have 
been  uttered,  and  are  uttered  still,  by  the  de 
scendants  and  the  heirs  of  a  race  that  for  genera 
tions  has  been  habituated  to  the  most  serious  kind 
of  assertion  unchecked  by  reference  to  actual  fact. 

On  the  optimism  that  underlies  these  new  dog 
mas  is  really  based  our  tremendous  national 
faith  in  democracy.  If  human  nature  is  really 
perfectible,  even  though  it  never  get  to  perfection, 
democracy  can  really  solve*  the  problems  of  life, 
when  they  come  upon  us  in  all  their  force,  as 
they  have  never  been  solved  before.  But  if 
human  nature  should  after  all  prove  damnable, 
democracy  may  turn  out  a  less  certain  panacea 
than  we  have  been  accustomed  to  believe. 

Experience  nowadays  seems  bound  rapidly  to 
supplant  the  national  inexperience  that  has  hith 
erto  been  our  most  characteristic  heritage.  As  ex 
perience  grows  about  us,  there  is  reason  to  doubt 
whether  the  serenely  optimistic  dogmas  of  the  last 
century  or  more  are  essentially  so  true  as  we  have 
been  taught  at  school.  There  are  moments,  in 
fact,  when  the  gloomier  dogmas  that  the  Calvinist 
fathers  brought  from  wicked,  overcrowded  Eng 
land  seem  after  all  nearer  the  truth  visible  to  our 
own  eyes.  And  in  that  case  democracy  cannot 
seem  as  ultimate  a  solution  of  life  as  it  used  to. 
There  are  obvious  aspects  in  which  it  is  begin 
ning  to  look  terribly  like  the  substitution  of  a 
myriad  damnable  tyrants  for  a  few. 


14  STELLIGEKI 


So  much,  in  one  way  or  another,  the  papers  in 
this  little  book  will  show.  Coldly  written  down 
here,  it  looks  disheartening,  if  not  disloyal.  Yet 
I  do  not  think  that  it  is  really  either.  It  is  dis 
heartening  only  if  we  are  afraid  to  face  a  future 
of  manly  struggle  instead  of  Utopian  dreams.  It 
is  disloyal  only  in  the  sense  in  which  a  subject  is 
disloyal  who  feels  bound  not  to  deny  the  sins  and 
the  vices  of  a  sovereign  he  willingly  serves. 

To  any  thoughtful  man,  I  suppose,  the  evils 
and  the  dangers  of  his  own  time  are  often  more 
apparent  than  its  nobler  traits.  And,  very  surely, 
this  is  no  depressing  symptom.  So  long  as  evils 
and  dangers  are  recognized,  they  will  be  met,  at 
least,  with  effort.  It  is  the  hidden  disease  that 
works  the  worst  havoc.  And  even  when  these  evils 
and  dangers  seem  to  permeate  a  whole  national 
system,  there  is  no  need  to  lose  courage.  Human 
institutions,  like  human  beings,  must  have  their 
faults  and  their  weaknesses.  They  must  be  trans 
itory.  Even  the  great  religions  of  the  world  are 
bound  to  change  and  to  pass ;  much  more,  the 
political  systems  by  which  from  time  to  time  men 
submit  to  be  governed.  But  through  every  change 
runs  what  after  all  is  a  steady  purpose.  Really, 
in  its  deepest  heart,  the  human  race  is  constantly 
struggling  onward  in  a  blind  effort  to  be  happier, 
wiser,  better. 


STELLIGERI  15 

Any  man  or  any  generation  can  see  only  a  mo 
mentary  fragment  of  this  struggle.  In  that  mo 
ment,  however,  men  can  perceive  the  forces  that 
they  must  meet  and  conquer  if  they  are  to  leave 
their  children  a  richer,  wider  heritage  than  they 
themselves  received.  To  meet  and  to  conquer 
these  hostile  forces  they  must  yield  themselves 
up  to  human  leaders ;  and  these  human  leaders, 
being  human,  must  be  frail.  Now  it  is  a  sovereign 
man  whom  the  loyal  are  bound  to  follow,  again  a 
sovereign  class,  with  us  a  sovereign  people.  And 
how  hearty,  for  all  our  misgivings,  is  our  real 
loyalty  to  our  sovereign,  we  can  all  feel  for  our 
selves  when  our  blood  tingles  at  the  thought  of 
submission  to  domination.  We  may  lament  as  we 
please  the  follies  and  the  errors  of  the  thousand- 
headed  populace  who  stand  for  us  in  the  place 
traditionally  held  in  history  by  consecrated  sov 
ereigns.  But  each  of  us  would  still  rather  live 
and  die  a  citizen  than  even  the  proudest  subject. 
Whoever  does  not  feel  this  spirit  in  himself  can 
not  know,  in  his  inner  heart,  what  the  name 
American  means. 


VI 


THERE  are  moments,  however,  when  the  sight 
of  the  great  changes  that  are  now  coming  upon 
us  makes  our  hearts  sink.  If  America  in  the  fut 
ure,  we  tell  ourselves,  were  to  be  like  America 


16  STELLIGERI 

in  the  past,  all  would  surely  go  well,  as  far  as 
human  foresight  can  reach.  There  is  none  of  us, 
I  believe,  who  would  not  willingly  trust  our  fut 
ure  to  such  native  guidance  as  has  governed  our 
past.  But  the  floodgates  are  opened.  Europe  is 
emptying  itself  into  our  Eastern  seaports ;  Asia 
overflowing  the  barriers  we  have  tried  to  erect  on 
our  Western  coast ;  Africa  sapping  our  life  to  the 
southward.  And  meantime  the  New  England 
country  is  depopulated,  and  the  lowlands  drained 
by  the  Mississippi  are  breeding  swarms  of  dema 
gogues.  And  so  on,  and  so  on,  and  so  on.  If 
the  future  were  to  be  as  the  past,  we  say  ! 

Well,  how  if  it  were  ?  Better  still,  how,  after 
all,  if  perhaps  it  be  ?  In  many  ways  it  will  inevi 
tably  differ.  Its  experience  must  be  far  sterner, 
far  fiercer  —  in  every  way  on  a  grander  scale. 
But  if  the  evils  to  meet  be  greater,  may  not 
greater  virtues  rise  to  meet  them  ?  For,  after 
all,  as  we  scrutinize  this  past,  we  cannot  find 
the  facts  quite  so  splendid  as  the  traditions.  A 
little  while  ago  we  tried  to  sum  up  our  impres 
sions  of  what  this  real  past  was  ;  and  we  called  it 
no  better  than  two  centuries  or  so  of  national  in 
experience,  youthfully  asserting  human  nature 
to  be  essentially  better  than  scrutiny  shows  it  to 
have  been  even  on  the  spot  where  these  cheerful 
generalizations  were  made.  That  the  past  was 
not  really  all  that  we  like  to  boast,  is  a  fact  that 
should  give  us  courage.  By  the  same  token,  it 


STELLIGERI  17 

may  well  be  that  the  future  shall  not  bring  all 
that  we  dread  to  fear. 


VII 


IT  is  posterity,  of  course,  that  makes  traditions. 
But  it  can  make  them  only  of  the  stuff  it  finds 
ready.  The  children  in  their  youth  know  the 
fathers,  in  their  age  tell  their  own  children  what 
manner  of  men  the  fathers  were.  Untrue  in  a 
thousand  details,  then,  traditions  —  like  other 
ideals— are  bound  to  rest  on  a  basis  of  truth  per 
haps  deeper  than  appears  to  one  who  coolly 
scrutinizes  in  all  their  living  confusion  the  facts 
from  which  they  rise. 

Petty  we  may  find  the  realities  of  our  actual  past 
— sordid,  inexperienced.  But  whatever  these  re 
alities,  we  all  know,  and  instinctively  we  all  thrill 
with  the  knowledge,  that  from  that  past  have 
come  the  traditions  that  have  guided  and  that 
still  guide  our  native  national  life.  What  the 
reality  was,  after  all,  is  not  the  chief  question. 
More  notable  for  us,  a  thousand  times,  is  the 
ideal  which  that  reality,  with  all  its  errors,  has 
transmitted  to  posterity.  For  that  ideal,  that 
tradition — smile  at  its  details  as  we  may — is  really 
noble.  It  is  pure,  simple,  aspiring.  In  us  all  it 
has  bred  the  deepest  feeling  that  marks  us  as  fel 
low-countrymen.  Let  us  be  pure  in  heart,  simple 
in  life,  aspiring  in  effort.  Then  so  far  as  in  us 
2 


18  STELLIGERI 

lies  we  may  transmit  to  our  children  an  enriched 
heritage  of  such  tradition  as  the  fathers  have  left 
us.  Our  faults,  like  theirs,  shall  fade  and  pass  ; 
our  memories  shall  merge  with  theirs  in  the 
dreamy  past  from  whence  shall  come  the  inspira 
tion  that  shall  make  greater  than  our  own  America 
the  unseen  America  of  the  future. 

VIII 

IT  is  easier  to  realize  such  sentiments  as  this  in 
small  instances  than  in  large.  We  are  right,  then, 
in  cherishing  so  dearly  our  local  traditions,  our 
family  pride.  We  are  better  men,  I  believe,  and 
better  citizens,  for  loving  not  only  our  country 
but  our  States,  not  only  our  States  but  our  towns, 
not  only  our  families  but  our  colleges.  And  very 
surely  there  is  for  some  of  us  no  firmer  warrant 
that  the  traditions  we  love  shall  live  as  long  as 
our  memory  shall  last  than  the  warrant  we  find  in 
remembering  the  stelligeri  of  Harvard. 

Their  lives  and  their  notions  were  often  petty 
enough,  limited,  absurd  to  their  children  as  the 
barbarous  old  Latin  catalogues  will  probably 
seem  to  ours.  There  were  plenty  of  weaklings 
among  them,  too,  no  doubt.  Almost  every  class 
had  its  Tom  who  drank  himself  to  death,  or  its 
Dick  who  was  justly  jailed,  or  its  Harry  who 
proved  the  most  deplorable  of  husbands.  Nor 
were  these  stelligeri,  as  a  body  men,  of  great  dis- 


STELLIGERI  19 

tinction.  They  number  several  thousands,  and 
among  them  are  not  many  dozens  who,  as  the 
years  begin  to  pass,  can  survive  in  human  memory. 
Names  and  dates  most  of  them  must  ultimately 
be.  The  rest  oblivion. 

Yet  whatever  their  personal  traits,  there  has 
come  from  them  to  us  who  follow  them  a  tradition 
of  our  own  without  which  we,  and  our  country, 
were  poorer.  Like  the  great  traditions  of  Amer 
ica,  this  little  tradition  of  Harvard  is  pure,  simple, 
aspiring,  and  lasting.  And  in  it  finally  merge  all 
the  folly,  the  error,  the  weakness,  the  nonsense 
of  the  swiftly  passing  college  generations  that  for 
two  centuries  and  more  have  received  and  pre 
served  it.  On  the  open  books  of  the  college 
shield  is  the  single  word,  "  Veritas" — "  Truth" 
Keep  truth  in  view,  say  the  silent  voices  of  them 
that  bear  the  stars,  and  trust,  like  us,  that  all 
shall  be  well. 

In  aspect,  in  thought,  in  phrase,  in  purpose, 
we  of  the  present  and  the  future  differ  more  and 
more  from  them  of  the  past.  That  their  names 
were  preserved  in  pompous,  barbarous  Latin,  and 
that  ours  shall  be  recorded  in  plain,  every-day 
English,  typifies  the  difference  with  a  truth  that 
makes  the  very  change  a  preservation  of  the 
deepest  tradition  of  Harvard.  But  in  spirit,  if  we 
be  loyal,  we  may  be  at  one  with  them.  And  so 
far  as  our  parts  may  go  to  preserve  for  America 
what  is  best,  to  discard  what  is  evil,  to  fight  our 


20  STELLIGEKI 

fight  bravely,  and  at  last  to  go  without  misgiving 
to  our  rest,  our  way  is  plain  before  us.  For  we 
have  only  to  follow  the  footsteps  of  them  that 
bear  the  stars. 


II 

THE    FOUK    AMEKICAN 
CENTUKIES 


(An  Address  before  the  Public  Schools  of  Worcester 
Massachusetts,  on  Columbus  Day,  October  21,  1892.) 


THE    FOUE    AMEEICAN 
CENTUEIES 


AMONG  the  most  interesting  books  of  the  past 
year  is  Mr.  John  Fiske's  "  Discovery  of  America." 
It  is  a  history  of  that  fascinating  kind  which  tells 
us,  to  be  sure,  little  that  was  not  known  before 
hand  ;  but  that  shows  us,  so  simply  that  we 
hardly  realize  we  are  being  taught,  where  each 
scattered  bit  of  knowledge  belongs.  Careful 
students  of  one  period  or  another  may  find  in 
Mr.  Fiske's  work  errors  of  detail :  to  write  so  com 
prehensive  a  book  without  minor  errors  were  al 
most  to  transcend  human  frailty.  But  no  one,  I 
think,  can  read  the  book  without  a  fresh  and  a 
lasting  appreciation  of  that  great  process  of 
human  development  whose  most  significant  mo 
ment  we  celebrate  to-day. 

For,  after  all,  the  moment  when  Columbus  set 
foot  on  the  unknown  land  which  marked  the  limit 
of  the  western  seas  is  a  moment  worth  all  the  honour 
we  pay  it,  not  for  its  own  sake,  but  because  it  was 
no  accident — no  isolated  thing ;  it  was  one  step 
in  a  great  process,  started  in  the  most  remote  past 


24        FOUE  AMEKICAN  CENTURIES 

and  even  as  yet  unfinished.  In  itself  it  might 
have  meant  as  little  as  the  landfall  of  those  half- 
legendary  Norsemen  who  have  left  behind  them 
no  more  trace  than  the  winter  tales  of  their  sagas. 
But  the  landing  of  Columbus  means  more  :  it  is 
significant  to  all  men,  as  a  part  of  the  direct  proc 
ess  by  which  human  beings  finally  came  to  know 
the  inevitable  limit  of  material  things. 

II 

As  I  write  that  phrase  it  sounds  mysterious. 
Yet  what  it  means,  any  child,  who  will  stop  to 
think,  can  understand.  Wherever  we  read  of 
human  beings  in  history,  up  to  the  time  when 
this  Western  continent  was  discovered,  we  find 
that  they  were  living  in  a  world  surrounded  by 
oceans  or  countries  they  knew  nothing  about. 
The  Eomans,  for  instance,  knew  most  of  Europe 
pretty  well,  and  they  knew  something  of  Asia 
and  of  northern  Africa.  But  all  about  them, 
north,  south,  east,  and  west,  the  earth  stretched 
on,  they  knew  not  whither.  Somewhere  in  the 
Western  Ocean  there  was  an  ultima  Tliule — an  isl 
and  beyond  which  no  man  had  gone.  And  there 
were  faint  legends  of  other  great  islands  to  the 
west  of  Gibraltar,  and  of  a  fabled  Atlantis,  no 
more  tangible  than  the  rivers  and  canals  of  the 
planet  Mars.  And  just  as  those  imperial  Romans 
— in  so  many  ways  people  quite  as  civilized  as  the 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES          25 

earth  lias  ever  known — lived  in  a  world  where  be 
yond  known  lands  and  seas  there  stretched  on  an 
endless  region  of  lands  and  seas  that  were  un 
known  ;  so,  in  just  such  a  world  of  endless  pos 
sibilities  beyond  its  known  limits,  lived  every 
human  being,  recorded  or  unrecorded,  until  the 
process  of  discovery  was  finished  which  the  voy 
age  of  Columbus  began. 

It  is  worth  our  while,  then,  to  consider  for  a 
moment  just  what  this  change  in  our  knowledge 
of  the  shape  and  limits  of  the  earth  means.  In 
order  to  live,  human  beings  must  be  fed  ;  in  order 
to  be  fed,  they  must  cultivate  and  consume  the 
fruits  of  the  earth.  And  as  population  anywhere 
increases,  more  and  more  of  the  earth  has  to  be 
cultivated  to  feed  it.  In  this  very  city  of  Worces 
ter,  for  example,  there  was  probably  a  time,  not 
quarter  so  long  ago  as  the  time  of  Columbus,  when 
everybody  who  lived  here  could  raise  on  his  own 
land  enough  food  to  supply  himself  and  his  fam 
ily.  At  this  moment,  though  Worcester  is  not  a 
great  city  like  New  York  or  London,  it  is  a  good 
deal  too  largo  to  be  supported  by  food  grown  on 
Worcester  soil ;  it  has  to  send  West  for  its  beef 
and  its  flour,  and  so  on.  What  is  more,  I  should 
be  surprised  if  there  were  among  you  many  who 
do  not  number  among  your  friends  somebody 
who,  instead  of  settling  down  at  home,  has  gone 
West ;  in  other  words,  somebody  who  could  not 
find  at  homo  work  that  would  provide  him  with 


26          FOUK  AMEEICAN  CENTURIES 

sucli  food  and  clothing  and  comfort  as  lie  had 
made  up  his  mind  to  have,  and  who  has  gone  to 
a  newer  country  in  search  of  a  quicker  fortune. 
Now  just  such  a  process  as  each  of  you  can  under 
stand  here  on  a  small  scale,  is  always  going  on 
all  over  the  world.  The  places  where  people 
live  grow  too  crowded  to  support  them ;  so  peo 
ple  move  somewhere  else  where  there  is  more 
room. 

I  do  not  mean  that  people  in  general  sit  down 
and  quietly  think  this  out.  In  the  time  of  Co 
lumbus,  for  example,  I  do  not  suppose  that  many 
people  in  Europe  actually  realized  that  the  time 
was  not  far  off  when  Europe  would  be  over 
crowded.  But,  all  the  same,  the  fact  was  there  ; 
and  with  it  the  fact  that  no  human  being,  until 
long  after  Columbus  was  dead  and  buried,  knew 
whether  there  might  not  be,  beyond  the  known 
world,  endless  lands  where  the  human  beings 
who  should  by  and  by  be  crowded  out  of  Europe 
might  go. 

Now  think  of  what  every  one  of  you  knows  to 
day.  On  this  globe  of  ours,  which  any  of  us 
might  easily  travel  around  in  three  months,  there 
are  two  great  continents — one  in  each  hemi 
sphere  ;  and  there  are  some  islands  in  the  South 
ern  seas,  Australia  and  New  Zealand,  and  a  great 
archipelago  of  smaller  ones ;  and  that  is  all. 
There  is  nowhere  else  where  human  beings  can 
ever  go.  When  the  population  of  the  world,  as 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         27 

we  see  it  mapped  in  any  school  geography,  has 
increased  in  anything  like  the  proportion  in 
which,  within  less  than  a  hundred  years,  the 
population  of  the  city  of  Worcester  has  in 
creased,  the  human  race  will  have  such  a  prob 
lem  to  solve  as  in  all  its  history  it  has  never  had 
before.  It  will  be  face  to  face  with  what  it  can 
already  foresee — with  the  limited  power  of  this 
earth  to  support  life,  or,  to  use  the  more  mysteri 
ous  phrase  with  which  I  began,  with  the  in 
evitable  limit  of  material  things. 


Ill 


IN  the  time  of  Columbus,  four  hundred  years 
ago,  the  Old  World  of  Europe  was  getting  far 
nearer  its  own  limits  than  anybody  realized.  I  do 
not  mean,  of  course,  that  it  was  within  a  few 
years  of  starvation  ;  such  processes  as  I  am  now 
talking  of  move  on,  not  by  months  or  years,  but 
by  centuries.  This  four-hundredth  birthday  of 
the  New  World  might  better  be  called  the  fourth 
birthday  of  the  whole  world.  But  even  before 
the  time  of  Columbus,  the  more  active  men  in 
Europe  were  getting  restless;  the  spirit  of  ex 
ploration  was  in  the  air.  Travellers  had  forced 
their  way  eastward  across  the  whole  width  of  the 
continent  of  Asia.  Sailors  had  begun  to  round 
the  southern  limits  of  Africa.  And  all  this  meant 
that,  hardly  knowing  what  it  did,  growing  Eu- 


28        FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

rope  was  calling  to  its  aid  the  resources  of  the 
Indies.  Had  there  been  no  Indies,  or  had  the 
lands  which  Columbus  always  believed  to  be 
Asiatic  proved  to  be  anything  other  than  the 
coasts  of  a  new  hemisphere,  almost  untenanted 
by  man,  then — even  by  this  time — the  final  strug 
gle  of  European  humanity  with  the  inevitable 
limit  of  material  things  might  have  begun. 

For,  after  all,  looked  at  in  a  larger  way,  we  of 
America  are  Europeans  as  truly  as  our  language 
is  English.  There  are  differences,  to  be  sure,  be 
tween  us  who  have  crossed  the  western  seas  and 
our  kinsfolk  whom  our  crossing  has  permitted  to 
remain  safely  at  home.  Such  differences,  with 
that  fine  instinct  of  self-respect  which  is,  perhaps, 
our  finest  national  trait,  we  love  to  cherish,  much 
as  we  love  to  cherish  family  pride.  But  just  as 
our  past  history  is  as  truly  European  as  is  the 
past  history  of  Spain  or  of  England,  so  is  the  fut 
ure  history  of  Europe  bound  to  include  our  future 
history  too.  For  this  world  we  live  in  we  know 
now  to  be  a  whole  world,  united  in  itself  as 
surely  as  it  is  eternally  separate  from  other 
planets  and  other  systems.  Its  history  is  bound 
to  be  the  history  of  the  domination  of  that  race 
which  in  the  struggles  of  the  ages  proves  most 
worthy  to  survive.  And  that  race,  I  hope  and 
believe,  is  the  race  of  which  we  form  a  part  and 
in  a  certain  sense  the  advance  guard — the  race 
whose  great  records  were  first  written,  now  by 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         29 

this  nation,  now  by  that,  in  the  history  and  the 
literature  of  Europe. 

IV 

To  this  history  and  this  literature  our  New 
World  has  added  its  own  pages.  To-day  we  turn 
the  fourth  ;  what  shall  be  written  on  the  fifth  and 
those  which  shall  come  beyond,  none  of  us  may 
ever  live  to  know.  And  to  prophesy  were  idle. 
But  it  seems  to  me  that  we  may  well  consider  for  a 
few  moments  the  record  that  our  New  World  has 
already  made ;  and  perhaps  pause  for  a  little  while 
to  consider  also  its  meaning.  The  limits  of  the 
centuries  of  world  history  are  as  accidental  as  the 
limits  of  the  years  in  a  man's  life.  Our  birthdays 
ire  matters  of  chance.  But  just  as  each  of  the 
pears  which  are  carrying  us  on  from  cradle  to 
*rave  has  for  each  of  us  who  looks  back  on  it  a 
character  of  its  own,  so  when  we  look  back  on 
;he  four  centuries  that  separate  us  from  the  time 
;?hen  to  our  forefathers  all  beyond  the  western 
?ea  was  fathomless  mystery,  it  seems  to  me  that 
iach  of  the  centuries  begins  to  grow  distinct. 


THE  first— the  Sixteenth  Century  of  the  Christian 
jra — sums  itself  up  in  our  American  history  as  the 
;entury  of  exploration  and  of  Spanish  conquest, 
[n  the  records  of  that  time  there  is  nothing,  I  be- 


30        FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

lieve,  more  fascinating  than  the  maps.  Almost 
year  by  year,  as  fresh  navigators  brought  back 
fresh  reports,  we  can  watch  the  islands  and  the 
continents  emerging  from  the  fantastic  mystery 
of  legendary  seas.  Perhaps  no  one  feature  of  this 
growth  is  more  notable  than  that  of  the  region  to 
which  German  geographers  first  gave  the  name 
of  the  maligned  Florentine,  Amerigo  Vespucci — 
a  name,  as  at  last  we  know,  that  in  every  sense 
we  may  be  proud  to  bear.  Sailing  to  the  south 
ward  of  the  lands  where  Columbus  had  preceded 
him,  he  came  upon  another  land,  seemingly  inde 
pendent  of  those,  hitherto  unknown.  In  the  older 
maps  it  appears  as  an  island,  of  which  the  exact 
limits  are  still  to  be  fixed,  much  as  Greenland  used 
to  appear  in  the  school  geographies  of  my  child 
hood.  Map  by  map  these  limits  grow  distinct, 
until  by  and  by  we  see  that  the  first  America  of 
Vespucci  was  no  island  at  all ;  it  was  that  eastern 
most  part  of  our  own  great  continent  to  which 
later  geographers  finally  gave  what  had  once  been 
the  legendary  name  of  Brazil.  And  as  map  by 
map  the  continent  grows,  we  can  watch  the  emer 
gence  into  human  history  of  these  northern  re 
gions,  which  were  destined  to  be  the  homes  of 
our  fathers  and  our  children. 

During  the  first  century  of  our  Western  history, 
however,  these  northern  regions  were  little  vexed 
by  other  than  exploring  Europeans.  It  was  to 
the  southward  that  Europeans  were  making  their 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         31 

permanent  mark,  in  the  regions  that  still  bear 
the  name  of  the  Indies,  and  those  yet  wider  regions 
which  to  this  clay  retain  an  impress  that  could 
have  been  made  only  by  the  imperial  Spain  of 
Charles  V.  and  Philip  II.  Within  our  own  coun 
try,  one  may  almost  say,  the  only  lasting  mark 
of  that  century  is  the  name  Virginia,  preserving 
for  us  the  memory  of  her  who,  until  our  own 
time,  might  stand  unchallenged  as  the  noblest  of 
English  queens.  Beyond  our  limits,  in  Mexico, 
in  Peru,  in  the  Indies,  Spain  wrote  upon  the  face 
of  the  New  World  the  ineffaceable  records  of  a 
system  in  devotion  to  which  untold  millions  of 
earnest  lives  have  been  and  shall  be  spent ;  a  sys 
tem  which  assumes  that  all  earthly  authority  must 
come  straight  from  God  in  Heaven,  through  his 
temporal  and  his  spiritual  anointed. 

VI 

THE  second  century  of  American  history — the 
Seventeenth  Century  of  the  Christian  era — is  one 
whose  records  mean  far  more  to  us.  In  the  course 
of  it,  I  believe,  all  but  one  of  the  colonies  were 
finally  settled  which  were  destined  to  be  the  germ 
of  the  United  States ;  and  those  which  for  a  little 
while  owned  the  sovereignty  of  Sweden  and  of 
Holland  yielded  themselves  to  the  authority  of 
the  English  crown.  For  all  that  to  the  north  of 
us  the  subjects  of  Louis  XIV.  were  striving  to 


32        FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

gain  for  France  such  a  foothold  as  to  the  south 
ward  the  subjects  of  Charles  and  of  Philip  had 
gained  for  Spain,  it  is  with  no  lack  of  confidence, 
I  believe,  that  we  may  name  the  second  century 
of  American  history  the  century  of  English  con 
quest. 

It  was  the  century  in  which  the  English  planters 
were  finally  settled  on  the  James ;  the  century 
in  which  the  Pilgrim  fathers  came  to  Plymouth 
and  the  Puritan  colonists  to  Boston  Bay.  Our 
national  records  are  full  of  traditions  which  be 
long  to  this  epoch.  It  was  the  century  of  Captain 
John  Smith  and  Pocahontas,  of  Peter  Stuyvesant 
and  the  old  Dutch  worthies  of  the  Hudson,  of 
Miles  Standish  and  Governor  Winthrop,  of  Roger 
Williams,  of  King  Philip's  War,  of  Sir  Edmund 
Andros,  of  the  Salem  witches.  In  the  country 
towns  of  New  England  there  is  hardly  a  burying  - 
place  whose  gray  stones  do  not  bear  the  names  of 
men  and  women  who  have  been  resting  beneath 
the  pines  and  the  elms  since  the  days  were  still 
fresh  in  memory  when  our  own  forefathers  broke 
the  soil  that  is  still  ours.  But  it  seems  to  me 
that  too  few  of  ns  are  disposed  to  remember 
what,  as  the  centuries  begin  to  pass,  stands  out 
as  the  chief  record  of  that  olden  time.  It  was 
in  the  Seventeenth  Century  that  first  were  planted 
in  American  soil  the  seeds  of  the  system  which, 
whether  we  know  it  or  not,  is  the  system  by 
which  our  national  life  must  stand  or  fall.  In 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         33 

that  century  our  continent  first  gave  asylum  to 
the  race  which,  in  its  heart  of  hearts,  acknowl 
edged  and  still  acknowledges  no  earthly  author 
ity  above  the  common  law.  For,  looked  at  in  the 
light  of  the  centuries,  our  own  constitution  and 
all  that  has  grown  up  beneath  it  are  but  out 
growths,  strong  with  the  strength  that  comes 
from  natural,  undistorted  growth,  of  that  firmest 
known  system  of  human  rights — the  common  law 
of  England. 


VII 


THE  third  century  of  American  history  —  the 
Eighteenth  of  the  Christian  era — is  a  century  of 
which  the  memory  is  still  more  our  own.  From 
whatever  point  of  view  one  looks  at  it,  no  fact  in 
its  course  is  much  more  salient  than  the  American 
Revolution.  To  foreigners  and  to  superficial  ob 
servers,  the  chief  trait  of  this  great  event  seems 
perhaps  to  be  that  for  the  first  time  in  modern 
history  it  demonstrated  the  power  of  colonies  to 
break  free  from  the  control  of  a  mother  country. 
To  us,  I  think,  it  has  a  trait  more  notable  than 
that :  it  marks  the  beginning  of  our  conscious  na 
tional  life ;  it  gives  us  a  right  to  name  this  third 
century  of  American  history  the  century  of  native 
conquest. 

Between  this  century  of  native  conquest,  how 
ever,  and  the  two  centuries  of  foreign  conquest 
3 


34        FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

which  preceded  it,  there  is  a  distinction,  I  think, 
which,  unlike  in  themselves  as  were  the  con 
quests  of  England  and  of  Spain,  groups  them  to 
gether  ;  and  which  marks  our  native  conquest  as 
a  thing  apart.  The  purpose  of  the  conquests  both 
of  England  and  of  Spain  was  to  impose  upon  a 
new  world,  hitherto  untrodden  by  civilized  men, 
the  systems  of  government  which  had  prevailed 
in  old  Europe.  It  was  the  purpose  of  our  native 
conquest  to  impose  no  system  on  anybody  or  on 
any  territory  ;  but  only  to  maintain,  in  the  face 
of  all  the  military  force  of  England,  those  rights 
which  by  the  common  law  of  England  not  even 
the  English  crown  had  a  right  to  touch.  This  is 
the  trait  that  distinguishes  our  revolution  from 
all  the  others  that  have  since  troubled  the  Old 
World  and  the  New.  One  and  all,  these  have 
striven  to  substitute  for  some  old,  established 
authority,  some  brand-new  system,  devised  by 
enthusiasts  and  untried  by  mankind.  Ours,  and 
ours  only,  strove  not  to  innovate,  but  to  preserve ; 
not  to  manufacture  a  ready-made  system  of  law 
and  government,  but  to  guard  and  protect  in  its 
normal  growth  a  system  of  government  which  had 
been  proved  sound  and  wholesome  by  centuries 
of  ancestral  experience. 

As  our  glances  at  American  history  come  nearer 
to  our  own  time,  their  field  perforce  grows  nar 
rower.  As  I  think  of  this  third  century  of  our  his 
tory,  I  find  myself  recalling  to  memory  two  struct- 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         35 

ures  on  the  Atlantic  sea-board  which  together 
symbolize  much  of  the  history  we  have  considered. 

The  first  is  on  the  Island  of  Cape  Breton.  On  a 
little  peninsula  there,  rocky,  grass-grown,  dotted 
with  grazing  sheep  —  a  little  peninsula  which 
stands  between  the  everlasting  surges  of  the  foggy 
ocean  and  a  quiet  harbor  still  capable  of  floating 
a  navy — is  a  great  line  of  ruined  fortifications. 
About  the  middle  of  the  last  century,  a  whole 
regiment  of  British  sappers  and  miners  worked  for 
half  a  year  in  the  endeavor  to  blow  them  up  and 
obliterate  them.  Yet  all  this  work  has  only  made 
huge  breaches  in  the  walls,  and  half-filled  the 
ditches  at  their  foot.  Grass-grown,  deserted  but 
for  the  sheep  and  a  few  poor  fishermen  and  smug 
glers,  the  walls  of  Louisbourg  still  remain  inde 
structible  in  their  outline.  You  or  I  can  still 
trace  there  every  bastion  and  every  port.  And 
this  useless,  deserted  ruin,  permanent  in  its  de 
fenceless  strength,  is  almost  all  that  remains  on 
the  eastern  coast  of  North  America  to  symbolize 
the  power  and  the  fall  of  that  system  of  authority 
which  France,  with  the  example  of  Spain  before 
her  eyes,  once  hoped  to  impose  upon  our  whole 
continent. 

The  second  structure  is  nearer  home.  In  the 
straggling  village  that  has  grown  at  the  mouth  of 
the  Piscataqua,  is  a  fragment  of  an  old,  unpainted 
wooden  house.  Newer  houses  and  village  shops 
crowd  close  upon  it  now.  But  even  in  its  shabby 


36        FOUK  AMEKICAN  CENTURIES 

decay  its  great  gambrel  roof  and  its  two  square 
chimneys  preserve  a  dignity  of  their  own.  It  is  a 
dignity  less  austere,  less  stern,  less  lordly  than 
that  of  the  lasting  masonry  of  Louisbourg;  but 
a  dignity  still  far  above  that  of  the  cottages  and 
the  shops  of  later  times.  Here  in  his  day  lived 
William  Pepperell,  the  Yankee  merchant  who,  in 
the  name  of  King  George  II.,  took  command  of 
the  Yankee  volunteers.  From  this  house  he  set 
forth,  leading  them  against  that  fortress  of  Louis 
bourg,  where,  behind  the  strongest  military  archi 
tecture  of  France,  the  system  of  authority  had 
intrenched  itself  to  withstand  and  to  oppose  the 
growth  of  that  other  system  whose  strength  lay 
in  the  English  common  law.  And  hither  he  re 
turned,  victorious  with  his  undisciplined  Yankees 
over  the  trained  mercenaries  of  Louis  XV. — to 
be  made,  in  honor  of  his  good  fortune,  the  one 
native  baronet  of  New  England. 

In  honor  of  his  good  fortune,  I  say,  because 
whoever  reads  the  story  of  that  first  Yankee  con 
quest  must  admit  that  our  victory  came  half  from 
the  blunders  of  the  French  and  half  from  pure 
chance,  hardly  at  all  from  any  skill  or  notable  prow 
ess  of  our  own.  In  a  way,  I  think,  that  very  ele 
ment  of  chance,  of  good  fortune,  makes  the  con 
quest  of  Louisbourg  all  the  more  typical  of  the 
growth  in  America  of  that  system  whose  strength 
lies  not  in  force  but  in  law. 

But  Sir  William  Pepperell's  house  is  to-day  as 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         37 

far  sunk  from  its  high  estate  as  is  the  fortress  of 
Louisbourg  itself.  Here  the  American  Revolu 
tion  has  done  its  work.  When  he  set  out  against 
Louisbourg,  Pepperell  stood  for  that  force  which 
characterized  the  second  century  of  American  his 
tory  as  opposed  to  the  force  which  characterized 
the  first.  Thirty  years  later,  his  descendants,  un 
changed  in  principle,  found  themselves  opposed, 
not  to  the  past  but  to  the  future.  The  victorious 
people  of  America  had  scant  mercy  for  whoever 
opposed  them.  The  Pepperells,  like  hundreds  of 
other  loyal  gentlemen,  saw  their  lands  confiscated 
and  themselves  driven  into  lasting  exile.  And 
to-day  strange  villagers  swarm  over  what  were 
once  their  gardens  and  in  the  dismantled  cham 
bers  of  their  dismembered  house. 

In  this  aspect,  it  seems  to  me,  the  ruinous  man 
sion  symbolizes,  more  clearly  than  we  like  to  ad 
mit,  the  state  in  which  the  American  Revolution 
left  us.  In  that  great  struggle,  I  believe,  the  Amer 
icans  were  in  the  right,  and  *in  the  right  because 
what  they  fought  for  was  no  abstract  principle, 
but  rather  the  maintenance  of  their  vested  rights. 
In  so  doing,  however,  they  were  forced  to  be  for 
the  moment  rebels.  As  rebels,  it  was  their  inevi 
table  misfortune  to  find  opposed  to  them  that  great 
part  of  the  best  and  worthiest  people  in  the  land 
who  in  any  crisis  feel  bound  to  throw  themselves 
on  the  side  of  established  authority.  And  this 
old  gray  house  of  the  Pepperells,  deserted  for  a 


38         FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

century  and  more  of  all  who  have  bad  a  birth 
right  to  be  there,  typifies  what  few  of  us  allow 
ourselves  to  remember — the  tremendous  sacrifice 
of  good  men  and  true  that  was  the  inevitable 
price  of  our  national  independence. 

VIII 

NATIONAL  independence— that  is  the  substance 
of  the  fourth  and  last  page  of  our  American  his 
tory,  the  page  we  are  closing  now,  with  the  Nine 
teenth  Century  of  the  Christian  era.  The  days  of 
the  Spanish  conquests  are  past ;  of  English  con 
quests,  too,  and  of  native.  For  a  hundred  years 
we  have  held  in  our  grasp  the  prize  that  the  Old 
World  proved  all  too  weak  to  retain.  What  ac 
count  shall  we  give  of  it  ? 

Our  greatest  national  characteristic,  it  seems  to 
me,  is  a  superb  self-confidence,  born  at  once  of 
temporary  freedom  from  limits  and  of  necessary 
ignorance  of  standards.  We  have  had  the  terri 
tory  of  a  whole  continent  wherein  to  make  our 
experiments  and  to  correct  our  blunders.  And 
we  have  never  had  close  at  hand  any  older  and 
wiser  nations  than  ourselves  by  which  as  a  people 
we  might  measure  our  own  shortcomings.  It  has 
been  the  fashion,  then,  very  honestly  to  assert 
that  God  opened  for  us  of  America  a  clean  page 
of  history,  and  that  the  record  which  our  free- 
born  citizens  are  writing  there  is  a  new  one  in  the 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         39 

history  of  mankind.  At  times  it  has  seemed  so 
to  all  of  us.  There  is  a  great  charm  in  those 
high-sounding  commonplaces  of  triumphant  de 
mocracy  that  we  have  borrowed  rather  from  the 
impracticable  philosophy  of  Eighteenth-Century 
France  than  from  the  sane  experience  of  Eng 
land,  Old  and  New.  There  is  a  certain  sethereal 
purity  in  the  philosophical  utterances  of  our  own 
New  England  which  sometimes  seems  very  mar 
vellous  to  those  of  us  who  would  be  helped  to 
live  in  the  spirit.  And  we  are  far  enough  to-day 
from  that  terrible  conflict  which  has  knit  together 
this  Union  with  bonds  closer  than  before  it  men 
dreamed  of,  to  see  that  North  and  South  alike  had 
ready,  when  the  moment  came,  endless  armies  of 
men  who  would  lay  down  their  lives  for  what 
they  deemed  the  truth. 

But  this  is  not  all  the  story.  We  must  admit, 
too,  I  fear,  that  we  have  in  our  history  records 
as  sordid,  as  corrupt,  as  debased  as  any  that  the 
Old  World  can  show.  WTe  must  admit  that  as 
this  continent,  which  a  century  ago  was  a  hardly 
explored  wilderness,  grows  densely  populous,  the 
human  nature  that  is  bred  here  is  the  same  old 
human  nature  of  the  ages.  We  have  added  incal 
culably  to  the  material  wealth  of  mankind ;  we 
have  added  perhaps  a  few  exquisitely  pure  notes 
— none  the  less  pure  for  their  faintness — to  that 
literature  which  our  mother  tongue  has  for  a 
thousand  years  been  adding  to  the  literature  of 


40         FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

the  world;  we  have  tried  on  a  scale  never  at 
tempted  before  the  great  experiment  of  demo 
cratic  self-government.  And,  when  we  honestly 
begin  to  give  an  account  of  this  new  page  of  hu 
man  history  we  have  tried  to  write  alone,  we  are 
forced,  I  think,  to  say  that  there  is  in  it  no  new 
lesson.  The  law  of  life  decrees  that  life  shall  be 
an  unending  struggle.  Relax  the  limits  of  ma 
terial  things,  as  for  us  they  have  been  awhile  re 
laxed,  and  the  struggle  grows  less  intense.  But 
faster  and  faster,  as  the  human  race  fills  the  earth 
whose  limits  we  know  at  last,  the  inevitable  old 
struggle  for  existence  is  upon  us,  with  all  its  old 
possibilities  of  heroism  and  of  baseness. 

Whether  we  will  or  no,  then,  the  future  offers 
to  us  of  America  little  else  than  it  offers  all  man 
kind.  As  our  past  history  is  European,  so  our 
future  history  must  be  shared  with  all  the  world. 
And  we  may  feel  sure  that  whatever  form  it  take, 
the  grand  outline  of  that  future  history  must  be 
the  same  as  the  grand  outline  of  human  history 
through  all  time.  The  life  of  man  is  an  unend 
ing  struggle  for  existence,  now  with  the  material 
things  about  him,  now  with  his  own  kind.  Our 
fathers  were  fighters  ;  we  must  fight  ourselves  ; 
and  the  battle  must  be  passed  on  and  on  to  our 
children  till  latest  time. 


OF 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         41 

IX 

THE  final  question,  then,  for  us  of  America  to 
ask  ourselves,  is  whether  in  our  own  history  we 
can  find  ideals  and  figures  that  shall  serve  us  and 
our  children  for  watchwords  in  the  struggle. 
There  are  moments  when  the  materialism,  the 
baseness,  the  corruption  that  at  any  moment 
mark  human  existence  anywhere,  make  one  sick 
at  heart.  The  dominant  fact  of  our  national 
history,  too,  the  fact  of  democracy,  is  sometimes 
terribly  disheartening.  For,  with  all  its  splendid 
generosity  to  the  people  at  large,  democracy  at 
heart  must  always  be  the  sworn  foe  of  excellence. 
No  man  can  excel  without  making  other  men 
seem  less  in  comparison.  And  whatever  tends 
to  inequality,  without  which  no  excellence  can 
be,  arouses  the  spirit  of  democracy  to  fierce 
rebellion.  By  the  side  of  the  great  histories  of 
the  world,  then,  this  page  of  ours,  despite  its 
material  records,  seems  none  too  rich  or  noble  in 
those  traits  which  make  mankind  better. 

But,  for  all  this,  and  for  all  the  blatant 
patriotic  untruth  that  sometimes  makes  one  feel 
as  if  all  patriotism  were  a  lie,  we  may  find  in  our 
records  traits  and  figures  that,  if  we  prize  them 
well,  may  guide  us  in  the  struggle  to  come  as 
surely  if  not  so  brilliantly  as  any  in  the  records  of 
peoples  who  more  willingly  recognize  and  respect 
superiority. 


42         FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES 

The  trait  that  above  all  others,  I  believe,  we  of 
the  United  States  should  reverence  and  cherish 
and  preserve  is  the  trait  that  phrases  itself  in  the 
angry  phrase  of  any  country  Yankee — "  I'll  have 
the  law  on  him."  Other  people  would  fight  foul ; 
we  fight  fair,  or  strive  to.  In  our  deepest  polit 
ical  nature  there  still  lurks  the  spirit  that  our 
forefathers  brought  from  England  two  centuries 
ago;  the  spirit — so  much  misrepresented  since — 
that  fought  and  won  the  American  Revolution ;  the 
spirit  that,  discarding  all  cloud-spun  theories, 
declares  and  with  self-restraint  maintains  the 
final  authority  of  that  common  law  which,  dis 
daining  empty  philosophies,  has  maintained  and 
extended  through  the  centuries  those  privileges 
and  rights  which  the  sure  teaching  of  human  ex 
perience  has  shown  us  may  safely  be  permitted 
to  men. 

And  if  we  ask  what  figures  we  may  place  before 
ourselves,  as  incarnations  of  what  is  best  in  our 
national  history,  I  find  myself  more  and  more  apt 
to  answer  that  there  is  in  our  history  a  roll  open 
to  all  eyes,  in  which  those  who  ponder  upon  it 
may  well  feel  more  and  more  pride.  It  is  not  a 
roll  of  great  men — rather,  perhaps,  of  petty  poli 
ticians,  some  of  them  a  bit  contemptible  to  those 
who  knew  them  best.  Better  still,  it  is  a  roll  of 
native  citizens  called  by  a  process  that  almost 
fatally  excludes  the  higher  excellences  of  char 
acter,  to  stand  for  a  little  while  before  the  eyes  of 


FOUR  AMERICAN  CENTURIES         43 

the  world.  I  mean  the  roll  of  the  dead  Pres 
idents  of  the  United  States.  At  a  moment  like  this 
it  is  not  fitting  to  speak  of  the  three  *  who  still 
survive.  But  when  their  time  shall  come,  these 
men,  I  believe,  could  ask  in  human  history  for  no 
worthier  place  than  that  which  shall  be  theirs. 
For  their  stations  await  them  in  the  lengthening 
line  of  those  sovereign  representatives  of  a  sover 
eign  people,  for  no  one  of  whom  that  people  has 
as  yet  the  right  to  feel  a  blush  of  shame. 

*  Written  before  the  death  of  Mr.  Hayes. 


Ill 

SOME  NEGLECTED   CHARACTERISTICS 

OF  THE 

NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS 


[A  paper  read  before  the  American  Historical  Associa 
tion  at  Washington,  December  30,  1891  ;  and  published  in 
the  Harvard  Monthly,  April,  1892.] 


SOME  NEGLECTED  CHARACTERISTICS 

OF  THE 

NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS 


ON  February  15,  1728,  the  Reverend  Benja 
min  Colman,  first  minister  of  the  Brattle  Street 
church,  preached  the  Boston  lecture  in  memory 
of  Cotton  Mather,  who  had  died  two  days  before. 
Cotton  Mather  had  lived  all  his  life  in  Boston ; 
there  is  no  record,  they  say,  of  his  ever  having 
travelled  farther  from  home  than  Ipswich  or 
Andover  or  Plymouth.  Of  sensitive  tempera 
ment,  and  both  by  constitution  and  by  conviction 
devoted  to  the  traditions  in  which  he  was  trained, 
he  certainly  presented,  to  a  degree  nowhere  com 
mon,  a  conveniently  exaggerated  type  of  the 
characteristics  that  marked  the  society  of  which 
he  formed  a  part.  But  Benjamin  Colman,  at  least 
in  earlier  life,  was  of  different  mettle.  After 
graduation  at  Harvard  College  he  had  passed 
some  years  in  England,  at  a  time  when  clever  Dis 
senters  could  see  good  company.  In  Boston, 
whither  he  had  returned  late  in  1699  to  take 


48       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS 

charge  of  the  new  church  subsequently  known  as 
the  Brattle  Street,  he  had  been  so  liberal — at 
least  in  matters  of  discipline — as  to  impress  the 
Mathers,  who  were  the  leaders  of  the  strictly 
orthodox  party,  as  a  dangerous  Eadical.  It  is  not 
too  much,  perhaps,  to  say  that  his  ministerial  ca 
reer  marks  the  beginning  of  that  movement  in 
the  Boston  churches  which,  a  century  later,  be 
came  Unitarianism  and  put  Calvinism,  at  best, 
hopelessly  out  of  fashion.  In  view  of  this,  his 
lecture  on  Cotton  Mather  becomes  curious. 

His  text  is  the  translation  of  Enoch:  "And 
Enoch  walked  with  God,  and  he  was  not,  for  God 
took  him."  From  these  words  he  draws  infer 
ences  that  enable  him  to  expound  the  career  and 
character  of  the  patriarch,  with  edifying  pre 
cision,  to  the  length  of  four  closely  printed  pages. 
But  what  he  chiefly  insists  on  is  that  Enoch's 
blessed  fate 

u  must  be  resolved  into  the  good  pleasure  of  God,  His  wise 
and  sovereign  will ;  and  to  be  sure  it  was  not  for  any 
merit  or  desert  in  Enoch's  holy  walking  with  God.  Enoch 
deserved  to  have  died  for  his  sins  as  well  as  any  before  or 
after  him.  .  .  .  Elias  was  a  man  of  like  passions 
with  others.  ...  It  was  not  due  to  the  righteous 
ness  of  either  that  they  were  taken  without  seeing  death. 
Before  that  God  formed  them  in  the  belly  he  designed 
them  their  translation." 

In  other  words,  the  Boston  divine,  who  at 
times  seems  the  most  Radical  of  his  generation, 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS       49 

feels  bound,  as  a  matter  of  course,  to  begin  his 
eulogy  on  the  most  distinguished  of  his  fellow- 
ministers  by  an  assertion  in  the  most  concrete 
terms  of  the  doctrine  of  election. 


II 


BEYOND  question  this  doctrine  was  never,  for 
many  hours,  absent  from  the  mind  of  Cotton 
Mather,  nor  often  from  that  of  Samuel  Sewall, 
the  two  worthies  of  the  period  then  drawing  to 
a  close  whose  diaries  are  best  preserved.  Beyond 
question,  too,  these  men  were,  in  this  respect, 
not  peculiar,  but  typical  of  their  time.  There  is 
hardly  a  figure  in  the  first  century  of  Boston  his 
tory  whose  conduct  and  opinions  can  present 
themselves,  to  modern  temperaments,  as  compre 
hensibly  human,  unless  we  keep  this  doctrine  con 
stantly  in  mind  ;  and  keep  it  in  mind,  too,  not  as 
a  verbal  dogma,  but  as  a  living  reality.  It  is  worth 
our  while,  then,  to  recall  exactly  what  it  was. 

In  the  beginning,  the  Puritans  believed,  God 
created  man,  responsible  to  Him,  with  perfect 
freedom  of  will.  Adam,  in  the  fall,  exerted  his 
will  in  opposition  to  the  will  of  God.  Thereby 
Adam  and  all  his  posterity  merited  eternal  punish 
ment.  As  a  mark  of  that  punishment  they  lost 
the  power  of  exerting  the  will  in  harmony  with 
the  will  of  God,  without  losing  their  hereditary 
responsibility  to  Him.  But  God,  in  His  iiifi- 


50       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS 

nite  mercy,  was  pleased  to  mitigate  His  justice. 
Through  the  mediation  of  Christ  certain  human 
beings,  chosen  at  God's  pleasure,  might  be  re 
lieved  of  the  just  penalty  of  sin,  ancestral  and 
personal,  and  received  into  everlasting  salvation. 
These  were  the  elect ;  none  others  could  be  saved, 
nor  could  any  acts  of  the  elect  impair  their  sal 
vation. 

All  this  is  familiar  enough.  What  puzzles  pos 
terity  about  it  is  how  so  profoundly  fatalistic  a 
creed  could  possibly  prove  a  motive  power  strong 
enough  to  result  not  only  in  individual  lives  but 
in  a  corporate  life,  that  was  destined  to  grow 
into  a  national  life,  of  passionate  enthusiasm, 
and  of  abnormal  moral  as  well  as  material  ac 
tivity. 

To  understand  this  nowadays  we  must  em 
phasize  a  fact  generally  neglected  by  the  writers 
of  New  England  history :  namely,  the  test  by 
which  the  elect  could  be  recognized.  The  test  of 
election,  the  Puritans  believed,  was  ability  to 
exert  the  will  in  true  harmony  with  the  will  of 
God — a  proof  of  emancipation  from  the  hereditary 
curse  of  the  children  of  Adam ;  whoever  could 
at  any  time  do  right,  and  want  to,  had  ground  for 
hope  that  he  might  be  saved.  But  even  the  elect 
were  infected  with  the  hereditary  sin  of  humanity ; 
and  besides,  no  wile  of  the  Devil  was  more  con 
stant  than  that  which  deceived  men  into  believing 
themselves  regenerate  when  in  truth  they  were 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PUEITANS       51 

not.     The  task  of  assuring  one's  self  of  election, 
then,  could  end  only  with  life. 

Ill 

COLMAN,  in  his  funeral  lecture,  states  this  doc 
trine  very  specifically : 

u  To  walk  with  God  means,  in  all  the  parts  and  instances 
of  a  sober,  righteous,  and  godly  life,  and  constancy  therein 
all  our  days.  We  walk  with  God  in  a  sincere,  universal, 
and  persevering  obedience  to  the  written  Word  and  re 
vealed  law  of  God  ;  and  blessed  are  the  undefiled  in  the 
way  that  walk  in  the  law  of  the  Lord.  To  walk  is  not  to 
take  a  step  or  two,  nor  is  it  for  a  day  or  a  year,  but  for 
the  whole  life,  all  our  days.  We  must  walk  and  work 
while  the  day  lasts ;  the  light  is  given  for  this.  How  much 
does  it  concern  us,  then,  to  ask  ourselves  whether  we  have 
indeed  begun  this  walk  with  God  and  to  Him  ?  Whither 
are  we  going  ?  What  are  we  doing  ?  How  do  we  live  and 
act ;  and  what  will  become  of  us  a  few  days  hence  ?  Will 
God  take  us  ;  take  us  on  the  wings  of  angels  and  in  their 
arms  to  His  own  presence  and  glory  ;  or  will  death  drag  us 
out  of  the  body  and  devils  take  us  away  to  their  abodes 
of  darkness  and  of  fire  unquenchable  ?  " 

The  Puritans  themselves  would  probably  have 
told  us,  as  their  lineal  religious  followers  some 
times  tell  us  to-day,  in  both  cases  with  perfect 
honesty  of  intention,  that  this  specifically  as 
serts  the  duty  of  man  to  give  himself  up  to 
God,  with  no  other  purpose  than  to  advance 
God's  glory.  Such  a  statement  does  not  explain 
in  modern  terms  why  any  living  man  ever  really 
did  so.  Few  facts,  indeed,  seem  much  truer  to 


52       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PUKITANS 

modern  minds  than  that  human  beings  do  what 
they  do  not  want  to  do  only  when  some  humanly 
overpowering  motive  makes  self-denial,  in  the 
end,  the  line  of  least  resistance.  And  looking 
at  Colman's  teaching  in  a  modern  spirit  we  may 
see  in  it,  without  much  trouble,  an  appeal  to 
an  everyday  human  motive  which  goes  farther 
than  most  things  else  to  explain  the  apparent 
inconsistency  of  Puritan  doctrine  and  Puritan 
character.  In  short,  what  ho  does,  and  what  all 
the  Puritan  preachers  do,  is  to  assume  the  doc 
trine  of  election  ;  to  declare  the  test  of  election 
to  be  ability  to  walk  with  God,  to  exert  the  will  in 
true  harmony  with  His ;  and  then,  by  every  means 
known  to  their  rhetoric,  to  stimulate  in  every 
one  of  their  hearers  the  elementary  and  absorbing 
passion  of  curiosity,  concerning  self-preservation. 

IV 

IN  the  diary  of  Cotton  Mather,  a  most  charac 
teristic  Puritan  document,  this  trait  appears  in 
a  form  almost  incredibly  exaggerated.  We  have 
in  these  manuscripts  a  pretty  full  account  of  him 
from  eighteen  to  sixty-one.  The  number  of 
private  fasts  he  kept  was  enormous.  It  is  not  too 
much  to  say  that  they  were  at  least  weekly  through 
out  those  forty-three  years.  For  twenty-two  of 
those  years  he  habitually  held  vigils,  too,— all- 
night  watches  in  his  library  of  ecstatic  prayer  and 
effort  to  penetrate  the  veil  that  is  between  God 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS       53 

and  man.  And  this  was  but  a  little  part  of  his 
passionate  effort  to  walk  with  God.  And  the 
only  modernly  comprehensible  motive  to  account 
for  all  this  passion  is  the  one  he  records  in  a  self- 
examination  at  the  age  of  forty-two  : 

UI  am  afraid,"  he  writes,  "  of  allowing  my  soul  a  wish 
of  evil  to  the  worst  of  all  [my  enemies].  .  Q. 

Whether  the  man  that  can  find  these  marks  upon  himself 
may  not  conclude  himself  marked  out  for  the  city  of 
God  ?  " 

The  same  trait  appears  in  Increase  Mather ; 
the  same  in  that  vastly  less  emotional  personage, 
Samuel  Sewall ;  the  same  reveals  itself  distinctly 
in  almost  every  godly  portrait  in  that  quaint 
gallery  of  worthies  that  fills  so  much  of  Cotton 
Mather's  "  Magnalia." 


THIS  book,  with  all  its  obvious  faults  and 
errors,  remains,  on  the  whole,  the  chief  literary 
monument  of  New  England  Puritanism.  It  has 
been  rather  the  fashion,  of  late  years,  to  criticise 
it  as  a  modern  historical  document ;  as  a  record  of 
actual  fact.  As  such  it  is  certainly  untrustworthy 
from  beginning  to  end.  So  modern  critics  are 
generally  disposed  to  put  it  aside  as  worthless, 
and  incidentally,  to  apply  the  same  adjective  to 
its  author.  Psychologically,  however,  the  "  Mag 
nalia  "  is  a  document  of  such  historic  value  that 
an  earnest  student  of  Puritan  New  England  can- 


54       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PUKITANS 

not  safely  neglect  it.  Any  work  of  serious  lit 
erature,  we  are  beginning  to  see,  must  inevitably 
express,  at  least  in  its  implications,  the  conditions 
of  the  society  wherein  it  was  produced.  And  these 
it  often  expresses  in  a  conveniently  generalized 
form  where  they  may  be  better  studied  than  in 
individual  phases  from  which  posterity,  as  best  it 
may,  would  draw  what  it  is  apt  to  think  more 
accurate,  because  more  conscious,  inductions. 
This  is  the  aspect  in  which  the  "  Magnalia  "  is 
most  significant.  As  a  piece  of  literature  it  pos 
sesses  two  traits  which  should  follow  directly 
from  the  fundamental  self-curiosity  of  the  Puri 
tan  character.  Within  arbitrary  and  rigidly  de 
fined  limits  it  is  intensely  imaginative  ;  and  it 
displays  throughout  a  serene  disregard  for  that 
fine  adjustment  of  phrase  to  fact  which  our 
modern  scientific  spirit  of  veracity  assume  sfor 
the  moment  to  be  eternally  the  chief  of  the 
cardinal  virtues. 

VI 

To  understand  the  peculiar  nature  of  its  in 
tensely  imaginative  quality  we  may  best,  perhaps, 
refer  not  to  itself  but  to  the  passage  from  Col- 
man's  funeral  discourse  to  which  we  last  directed 
our  attention.  The  quality  is  so  constant  among 
the  Puritans  that  you  may  find  it  almost  anywhere. 

"  Will  God,"  he  writes,  "take  us      ...      on  the 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS       55 

wings  of  angels  and  in  their  arms  to  His  own  presence 
and  glory  ?  or  will  death  drag  us  out  of  the  body,  and 
devils  take  us  away  to  their  abodes  of  darkness  and  of  fire 
unquenchable  ?  " 

This  sounds  commonplace  enough,  nowadays. 
But  a  gentleman  who  once  visited  Goethe  at 
Weimar,  has  told  me  that  Goethe's  first  ques 
tion  was  whether  it  were  a  fact  that  in  America 
there  were  still  people  who  believed  in  actual 
winged  and  crowned  angels ;  and  that  when 
he  answered,  as  was  then  true,  that  he  believed 
in  them  himself,  Goethe  looked  at  him  with  an 
expression  he  can  never  forget  and  exclaimed, 
"  Das  ist  wunderbar!"  Which  exclamation,  my 
friend  says,  began  his  emancipation  from  Puritan 
anthropomorphism.  To  come  nearer  our  own 
time,  it  is  not  a  dozen  years  since  in  a  Boston 
newspaper  somebody  wrote  in  a  very  serious  obitu 
ary  notice  concerning  a  secretary  of  the  American 
Board  of  Foreign  Missions,  that  "  few  men  on 
entering  heaven  will  find  a  wider  circle  of  per 
sonal  acquaintance  or  a  larger  number  of  those 
under  indirect  obligations." 

These  things  all  go  together  :  Column's  angels 
and  devils,  the  material  angels  of  the  Amer 
ican  boy  of  1830,  the  white  dickered  old  mis 
sionary  receiving  in  staid  social  formality  the 
emancipated  spirits  of  the  Polynesian  elect,  and 
the  godly  ministers  and  magistrates  of  our  Puritan 
Plutarch.  In  earlier  and  later  forms  they  are 


56       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PUKITANS 

concrete  examples  of  the  way  in  which  the  faculty 
we  call  imagination,  exerting  itself  for  genera 
tions  within  the  limits  of  what  after  all  was  an  in 
tensely  anthropomorphic  creed,  will  first  create 
for  itself  concrete  images,  only  less  material  than 
the  bronze  and  marble  ones  iconoclasm  casts 
down ;  and  then,  while  denying  that  bronze  or 
marble  can  be  symbolic,  will  passionately  and 
honestly  assert  its  own  images  to  be  real.  Nowa 
days  we  are  apt  to  look  on  all  these  images — 
material  and  immaterial  alike — as  only  symbols. 
But  Cotton  Mather  at  least  once  was  rewarded,  in 
ecstasy,  by  an  actual  vision  of  an  angel— wings, 
robes,  crown,  and  all ;  and  there  is  no  reason  to 
question  that  Colman,  who  was  well  on  with  his 
preparation  for  college  at  this  moment  of  Cotton 
Mather's  highest  ecstasy,  actually  believed  his 
devils  to  be  waiting,  with  hoofs  and  horns  and 
tridents,  for  such  of  humanity  as  the  unspeakable 
free  grace  of  his  just  God  had  not  undeservedly 
released,  with  Enoch,  from  the  ancestral  penalty 
of  human  sin. 

When  Cotton  Mather  drew  his  godly  portraits, 
they  stood  for  figures  so  vivid  in  his  imagina 
tion  that  he  had  no  more  suspicion  of  their 
actual  truth  than  of  the  elements  of  fiction 
and  invention  which  a  modern  eye  detects  in  his 
God,  his  angels,  his  devils.  When  Colman  spoke 
of  "  abodes  of  darkness  and  of  fire  unquench 
able,"  he  spoke  of  something  that  to  the  Puritans 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS      57 

represented  a  fact  as  concrete  as  the  Tower  of 
London,  or  as  the  George  II  of  whom  in  the  same 
lecture  he  writes  thus  : 

"What  an  honor  should  we  account  it  if  our  earthly 
prince  would  allow  us  to  walk  after  him  in  his  garden  ? 
Only  a  few  select  and  favorite  nobles  have  the  honor 
done  them." 

And  it  is  not  a  little  significant  of  the  exhaustion 
of  human  power  that  must  follow  constant,  over 
wrought  intensity  of  exercise  that  Colman  failed 
to  remark  the  strict  incompatibility  of  darkness 
and  unquenchable  flames. 

To  consider  this  exercise  of  imagination  in  an 
other  and  more  modern  spirit,  what  it  amounted 
to  was  this  :  Only  by  incessant  assurance  and  re 
assurance  that  the  will  was  exerting  itself  in 
harmony  with  the  will  of  God  could  the  insatiable 
curiosity  to  know  whether  God's  free  grace  were 
ours  be  for  a  moment  stayed.  God's  way  of  con 
templating  things  heavenly,  earthly,  infernal, 
belongs  to  that  class  of  perceptions  to  which  so 
many  modern  thinkers  give  the  convenient  name 
unknowable;  it  is  a  thing  which,  true  or  false, 
can  never  be  verified  by  either  observation  or  ex 
periment.  But  the  God  of  the  Puritans,  for  all 
he  was  a  spirit,  was  a  white-bearded  spirit,  with 
limbs  and  passions, — still  "  le  pere  cternel  dePccole 
italienne,"  who  had  made  man  in  His  visible  im 
age.  To  them  His  will  in  regard  to  all  things, 
great  and  small,  was  a  thing  not  only  that  might 


58       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS 

be  known,  but— if  life  were  to  possess  any  mean* 
ing — that  must  be  known  ;  and  that  being  known 
must  be  proclaimed.  In  the  intense,  incessant 
effort  that  followed  to  formulate  the  unknowable 
in  concrete,  anthropomorphic  terms,  imagination 
exhausted  itself.  What  we  call  the  prosaic  color- 
lessness  of  Puritan  life  is  merely  external.  The 
subjective  life  of  the  Puritans,  was  intensely, 
passionately  ideal ;  blazing  with  an  emotional 
enthusiasm  constantly  stimulated  by  the  unrec 
ognized  impulse  of  selfish  human  curiosity.  If 
you  want  proof  of  it,  ask  yourselves  how  otherwise 
people  who  after  all  are  not  far  from  us  in  years 
and  in  blood  could  have  survived  the  discipline 
and  the  public  devotions  which  were  to  them 
what  meat  and  drink  are  to  the  starving. 

VII 

THE  difficulty  that  followed  these  godly  emo 
tional  debauches  is  obvious.  To  the  Puritans  the 
concrete  images  thus  created  in  moments  of 
abnormal  ecstasy  were  more  real  and  unspeakably 
more  important  than  any  facts  of  actual  life.  Yet 
these  images,  in  each  case  inevitably  the  creation 
of  a  single  brain,  could  neither  be  confirmed  by 
any  general  process  of  human  observation,  nor 
tested  by  any  general  process  of  experiment. 
Each  seer  could  tell  what  he  himself  saw;  that 
was  all.  For  the  rest,  these  visions  were  such 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PUKITANS       59 

as  human  language  has  only  nietaphoric  terms  to 
describe.  The  consent  that  governs  the  meaning 
of  words  demands,  for  precision,  wide  identity  of 
experience.  We  all  know  the  insidious  tempta 
tion  to  impressive  inaccuracy  of  statement  which 
besets  whoever  has  had  a  solitary  adventure  with 
a  fish  or  a  snake.  Spiritual  experiences  are  in 
evitably  solitary.  Inevitably,  too,  they  cannot  be 
precisely  described.  Given  these  truths,  given 
the  fundamental  errors  of  human  nature,  given  too 
the  passionate  Puritan  conviction  that  an  exact 
account  of  spiritual  experience  is  the  only  valid 
evidence  you  can  give  of  your  eternal  salvation, 
and  you  get  two  pretty  obvious  results. 

The  first  was  never  better  phrased  than  by  In 
crease  Mather,  perhaps  the  most  canny  of  the 
Puritan  divines  whose  career  is  recorded.  In  early 
life  he  habitually  recorded  the  heavenly  afflations 
that  rewarded  his  ecstatic  prayers. 

"  As  I  was  praying,"  he  wrote  once,  u  my  heart  was  ex 
ceedingly  melted,  and  methoughts  saw  God  before  my  eyes 
in  an  inexpressible  manner,  so  that  I  was  afraid  I  should 
have  fallen  into  a  trance  in  my  study." — "In  his  latter 
years,"  adds  Cotton  Mather,  writing  of  him,  u  he  did  not 
record  so  many  of  these  heavenly  afflations,  because  they 
grew  so  frequent  with  him.  And  he  also  found 
that  the  flights  of  a  soul  rapt  up  into  a  more  intimate  con 
versation  with  heaven  are  such  as  cannot  be  exactly  re 
membered  with  the  happy  partakers  of  them." 

The  second  appears  very  clearly  in  what  Col- 


60       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS 

man  wrote  of  Cotton  Mather,  with  whom  in  his 
day  he  had  waged  fierce  fights : 

u  But  here  love  to  Christ  and  His  servant  commands  me 
to  draw  a  veil  over  every  failing ;  for  who  is  without  them  ? 
Not  ascending  Elijah  himself,  who  was  a  man  of  like 
passions  with  his  brethren,  the  prophets  ;  and  we  have  his 
mantle  left  us  wherewith  to  cover  the  defects  and  infirm 
ities  of  others  after  their  translation  in  spirit.  These 
God  remembers  no  more,  and  why  should  we  ?  and  he 
blots  out  none  of  their  good  deeds,  and  no  more  should 
we." 

Nil  de  mortuis  nisi  bonum,  in  other  words,  is 
God's  will — and  not  merely  a  Latin  apothegm.  In 
other  words  still,  it  is  God's  will  that  the  whole 
truth  should  never  be  spoken. 

VIII 

THE  traits  thus  hastily  specified  are  incessant 
activity,  within  rigid  limits,  of  anthropomorphic 
imagination,  strained  to  the  utmost  by  life-long 
efforts  concretely  to  formulate  the  unknowable ; 
and  a  sense  of  veracity  weakened  at  once  by  inces 
sant  dogmatic  assertion  of  unprovable  fact  and  by 
constant  conviction  that  only  such  truth  should  be 
spoken  as  was  agreeable  to  the  disposition  of  God. 
These  traits  appear  throughout  the  "Magnalia." 
And  whoever  does  not  recognize  in  the  ' '  Mag 
nalia  "  an  image  not  to  be  neglected  of  the  Puri 
tan  character  can  never  seriously  understand  the 
Puritans.  These  traits,  as  we  have  seen,  both 


THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PURITANS       61 

follow  directly  from  unquestioning  acceptance,  in 
its  most  concrete  form,  of  the  doctrine  of  election 
at  a  time  when  its  freshness  had  not  faded  into 
theological  tradition.  Doubts  assailed  the  Puri 
tans  often  enough,  but,  like  Increase  Mather,  the 
Puritans  met  doubts  not  by  reasoning — "  it  puts 
too  much  respect  upon  a  devil,  to  argue  and  par 
ley  with  him,  on  a  point  which  the  devil  himself 
believes  and  trembles  at " — but  by  "flat  contra 
diction."  And  the  energy  that,  during  the  first 
century  of  Boston  history,  fortified  them  to  con 
tradictions  as  incessant  as  temptations,  sprang, 
we  may  believe,  from  no  mystic  cause,  but  from 
nothing  more  marvellous  at  bottom  than  the  al 
most  incredible  stimulus  which  acceptance  of  this 
fundamental  doctrine  gave  to  self -searching,  self- 
seeking  curiosity. 


IX 


IN  discussing  these  old  New  Englanders  one  is 
apt  to  speak  as  if,  historically,  they  were  a  unique 
class.  It  is  perhaps  worth  while,  then,  for  one 
who  cannot  profess  to  be  a  trained  student  of  his 
tory,  distinctly  to  disclaim  any  such  elementary 
error.  Human  affairs,  people  think  nowadays, 
are  as  much  questions  of  cause  and  effect  as  any 
other  phenomena  observable  by  science.  Simi 
lar  conditions  will  produce  similar  characters  any 
where.  And  this  old  hierarchy  of  ours  will  very 


62       THE  NEW  ENGLAND  PUEITANS 

probably  prove  more  like  than  unlike  the  other 
hierarchies  that  by  and  by  serious  students  will 
have  studied  comparatively.  In  none  of  them, 
any  more  than  in  this,  will  such  fundamental 
traits  as  we  have  tried  to  detect  prove  to  be  the 
sole  ones.  In  no  serious  study  of  corporate  char 
acter  can  the  serious  student  for  a  moment  forget, 
for  one  thing,  the  crushing,  distorting  influence  of 
those  petty  material  facts  to  which  we  give  the 
convenient  name  of  every-day  life.  And  certainly 
these  concrete  facts  are  generally  more  profitable 
subjects  of  study  than  such  subjective  matters  as 
we  have  dealt  with  here.  What  is  more,  of  course, 
such  extreme  traits  as  we  have  touched  on  char 
acterized  chiefly  the  leaders  —  the  clergy,  the 
priestly  class.  During  the  first  century  of  New 
England  history,  however,  the  influence  of  this 
class  can  hardly  be  overstated.  And  just  because 
the  concrete  facts  commonly  engross  professional 
students  and  makers  of  history,  it  sometimes 
seems  that  such  aspects  of  history  as  we  have 
glanced  at — aspects  that  in  this  case  reveal  them 
selves  with  startling  distinctness  to  an  unprofes 
sional  explorer  of  Puritan  records — have  been 
perhaps  unduly  neglected. 

NOTE. — The  passages  from  Colman  are  cited  from  "  The 
Holy  Walk  and  Glorious  Translation  of  Blessed  Enoch." 
(Boston  :  J.  Phillips  &  T.  Hancock,  1728. )  The  other  cita 
tions  are  referred  to  authorities  in  my  "Life  of  Cotton 
Mather."  (New  York  :  Dodd,  Mead  &  Co.,  1891.)  From 
this  is  taken  directly  the  account  of  the  Puritan  creed. 


IV 


WEEE  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 
GUILTLESS? 


[A  paper  read  before  the  Essex  Institute,  Salem,  Massa 
chusetts,  on  February  29,  18(,>M.] 


WEEE  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 
GUILTLESS? 


WITHIN  tlie  past  few  years,  I  have  happened, 
at  the  suggestion  of  friends  interested  in  Psychic 
Research,  to  observe  three  different  phases  of 
occult  phenomena.  The  first  is  materialization, 
a  process  by  which  professional  mediums  pretend 
to  call  up  the  visible  and  tangible  bodies  of  the 
dead.  The  second  is  trauce-mediumship ;  the 
medium,  in  this  case  also  professional,  pretends 
to  be  controlled  by  some  departed  spirit  who  uses 
the  tongue  of  the  medium,  rather  unskilfully,  as  a 
means  of  communication  with  living  beings.  The 
third  is  automatic  writing  ;  in  this,  acting  as  a 
medium  myself,  I  have  held  a  pencil  and  allowed 
my  hand  to  run  unwatched  and  uncontrolled  by 
any  conscious  act  of  will.  I  have  thus  written  a 
great  many  distinct  words,  and  a  few  articulate 
sentences. 

Remote  as  this  statement  may  appear  from  a 
confession  of  capital  crime,  and  far  from  con 
clusive  as  my  limited  observation  and  experiment 

must  be,  I  found  that  when,  in  studying  the  life 
5 


66  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

of  Cotton  Mather,  I  was  compelled  to  examine 
the  history  of  Salem  witchcraft,  my  own  occult 
experiences  had  induced  in  me  a  state  of  mind 
that  led  to  some  speculative  conclusions  widely 
different  from  those  commonly  accepted.  These 
I  shall  venture  to  state,  wholly  aware  that  I  have 
neither  the  scientific  nor  the  historical  learning 
necessary  to  give  them  even  a  semblance  of  au 
thority,  but  hoping  that  they  may,  perhaps,  prove 
suggestive  of  a  line  of  study  which,  in  more  com 
petent  hands  than  mine,  might  lead  to  interest 
ing  results;  for  I  am  disposed  to  believe  not 
only  that  in  1692  there  was  existent  in  New  Eng 
land,  under  the  name  of  witchcraft,  a  state  of 
things  quite  as  dangerous  as  any  epidemic  of 
crime,  but  also  that  there  is,  perhaps,  reason  to 
doubt  whether  all  the  victims  of  the  witch  trials 
were  innocent. 

To  explain  this  statement,  I  may  best,  perhaps, 
begin  by  briefly  recounting  my  own  observations 
and  experiments,  and  then  turn  to  some  of  the 
evidence  in  the  witch  trials.  By  comparing  this 
with  my  experience  and  with  a  few  facts  admitted 
nowadays — such  as  the  phenomena  of  hypnotism 
— I  may  indicate  why  I  am  disposed  so  heartily 
to  dissent  from  the  rationalistic  view  of  the 
tragedy  of  two  centuries  ago,  which  has  been  so 
admirably  and  honestly  set  forth  by  standard 
historians. 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  67 

II 

MY  own  observations  of  modern  occultism  were 
made  in  the  order  in  which  I  have  named  them. 
I  saw  the  materialized  spirits  first ;  later  I  visited 
a  trance-medium ;  and  not  till  some  time  later 
did  I  try  my  hand  at  automatic  writing. 

Materialization  impressed  rne  as  indubitable 
fraud  from  beginning  to  end.  You  went  into  a 
room  which  was  subsequently  so  darkened  that 
you  could  not  discern  the  hands  of  your  watch. 
In  this  dim  light,  a  small  company,  mostly  ardent 
believers,  were  wrought  up  into  such  emotional 
excitement  as  could  be  awakened  by  hymn  tunes 
played  on  a  common  parlor  organ  ;  and  presently 
uncanny  shapes  began  to  flit  about.  Sometimes 
these  emerged  from  a  cabinet  in  which  the  me 
dium  had  professed  to  go  into  the  trance-state  ; 
sometimes  they  apparently  rose  through  the  floor ; 
at  least  once— to  all  appearances — they  took  shape 
on  top  of  an  ordinary  three-legged  table.  These 
figures  would  talk  with  you,  would  shake  hands 
with  you,  would  sometimes  be  unpleasantly  affec 
tionate  in  demeanor,  and  would  often  end  by 
"dematerializing"— that  is,  by  suddenly  flopping 
down  into  nothing,  much  as  figures  in  the  panto 
mime  disappear  through  trap-doors.  You  could 
not  see  how  the  trick  was  done,  but  the  trick  was 
essentially  like  what  any  number  of  travelling 
magicians  perform. 


68  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

Before  long,  however,  you  remarked  that  the 
habitual  frequenters  of  these  unedifying  exercises 
seemed  fervently  to  believe  in  them.  I  remem 
ber  once  finding  at  my  side  an  elderly  man  who 
passionately  embraced  a  male  spirit  that  appeared, 
and  returning  to  his  seat  whispered  to  me  in  agi 
tated  tones  that  it  was  his  son,  who  had  lately 
killed  himself.  The  son  had  been  a  friend  of 
mine  ;  and  when  I  told  the  father  so,  he  begged 
the  medium  to  recall  him,  that  I  might  speak  to 
him  myself  and  be  convinced.  But  the  medium 
professed  inability  to  recall  that  particular  spirit 
at  the  moment,  so  I  was  forced  to  remain  scepti 
cal  of  everything  but  the  fervent  belief  of  the 
heart-broken  father.  Next  you  remarked  that, 
knaves  and  charlatans  as  the  mediums  seemed, 
they  seemed  knaves  and  charlatans  of  a  specific 
kind.  There  was  no  doubt  in  your  mind  that 
they  lied  to  you  and  tricked  you,  but  I  for  one 
could  never  feel  satisfied  as  to  how  thoroughly 
they  were  aware  of  the  exact  extent  of  their  false 
hood — as  to  whether  beneath  all  this  nonsense 
and  rascality  there  were  not  lurking  some  mys 
terious  subjective  experience  that  had  to  them  a 
semblance  of  fact.  Finally,  you  felt  a  growing 
sense  of  debasement  in  such  surroundings.  The 
uncanny  insincerity  of  the  mediums,  the  crass 
superstition  of  the  believers  who  formed  the 
circle,  the  meaningless  words  and  conduct  of  the 
materialized  spirits — never  indecent,  but  always 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  69 

petty,  trivial,  low — led  me  by  and  by  heartily  to 
agree  with  a  friend  who  declared  that  while  he 
did  not  for  a  moment  believe  these  were  spirits  at 
all,  he  had  no  shadow  of  doubt  that  if  they  were 
spirits  they  were  devils. 

The  chief  trance-medium  I  visited  was  a  woman 
of  high  respectability,  and  of  great  apparent  sin 
cerity  of  character.  In  her  normal  condition  she 
professed  complete  ignorance  of  what  occurred 
when  she  was  in  the  trance-state.  Into  this  state 
she  could  throw  herself  at  will.  Once  in  this 
state  she  assumed  a  voice  and  manner  totally  un 
like  her  own,  and  professing  to  be  controlled  by 
a  spirit,  she  gave  you  any  number  of  messages 
from  departed  friends,  whom  she  sometimes  de 
scribed  and  sometimes  named.  In  a  sitting  with 
her  of  some  two  hours  I  remarked  that,  in  a  vague 
kind  of  way,  she  seemed  to  follow  my  line  of 
thought.  For  example,  she  made  a  queer  noise 
that  reminded  me  of  the  death  agony  of  a  friend 
some  time  before.  This  recalled  him  to  my  mind, 
and  the  circumstances  of  his  death.  By  and 
by,  she  named  him,  and  described  him  with  some 
approach  to  verisimilitude.  The  correspondence 
between  what  I  knew  and  what  she  told  me  was 
never  exact  enough  to  convince  me  of  anything 
extraordinary ;  but  it  seemed  close  enough  to 
warrant  me,  if  I  had  believed  in  mind-reading,  in 
classing  her  performance  as  mind-reading,  once 
for  all.  At  the  expiration  of  some  two  hours,  I 


70  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

found  myself  obliged  to  request  her,  while  still  in 
the  trance  state,  to  bring  the  sitting  to  a  close. 
At  my  suggestion,  then,  and  not  of  her  own  ac 
cord,  she  endeavored  to  resume  her  natural  con 
dition.  The  result  was  unexpected :  she  had  a 
startling  fit.  Amid  the  contortions  which  accom 
panied  what  she  asserted  to  be  the  departure  of 
the  spirit  which  had  controlled  her,  she  fell  on 
her  knees  with  a  cry  of  terror,  and  clutching  me 
begged  me  not  to  let  it  take  her  away  ;  and  she 
looked  with  every  appearance  of  agonized  alarm, 
at  an  empty  corner  of  the  room  from  which  she 
shrank  away  ;  you  would  have  said  she  saw  the 
Devil  himself  waiting  for  her.  In  a  very  short 
time  she  resumed  her  natural  condition,  at  first 
rather  dazed,  and  declared  that  she  had  no  idea 
whatever  of  anything  that  had  happened  since 
she  first  went  into  the  trance- state  two  hours  be 
fore.* 

The  most  remarkable  thing  to  me  about  her 
was  that  in  her  normal  condition  she  was  the  sort 
of  person  whom  you  instinctively  believe  to  speak 
the  truth.  It  was  perfectly  easy  to  assert  that 
she  was  a  common  trickster ;  but  to  my  mind,  at 
all  events,  the  assertion  was  by  no  means  convinc- 

*  It  is  fair  to  remark  here,  that  a  friend  deeply  inter 
ested  in  Psychic  Research  questions  the  accuracy  of  my 
memory  in  this  case.  I  can  reply  only  that  the  incident 
was  unique  in  my  experience,  and  so  horrible  as  to  produce 
a  very  lasting  impression. 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  71 

ing.  My  own  impression  was  strongly  that  she 
was  an  honest  person,  in  a  very  abnormal  state, 
honestly  self-deceived  ;  and  in  this  abnormal  dis 
play  and  in  this  self-deception  was  a  quality  of 
debasement,  more  subtle,  less  tangible,  than  I 
had  found  in  materialization,  but,  if  you  granted 
the  supernatural  hypothesis  at  all,  equally  dia 
bolical. 

A  year  or  two  after  this  I  found  that  if,  pencil 
in  hand,  I  left  my  hand  free  to  run  as  it  would, 
and  occupied  my  eyes  and  thoughts  with  other 
matters,  my  hand  would  clumsily  scrawl  first 
queer  tremulous  lines,  then  letters,  then  words. 
This  experience  was  in  no  wise  peculiar.  The 
friend  who  first  directed  my  attention  to  these 
experiments  had  made  a  considerable  collection 
of  automatic  writings  from  various  people  ;  and 
these  had  in  common  a  trait  that  mine  shared  with 
them.  The  avowedly  unguided  hand  would  make 
for  a  while — sometimes  day  after  day — apparently 
meaningless  lines  that  constantly  repeated  them 
selves.  In  time,  these  lines  would  grow  more 
definite.  Finally  a  word  would  be  written  ;  and 
by  comparing  a  number  of  the  writings  you  could 
trace  what  looked  like  a  long  series  of  almost  im 
potent  experiments,  finally  resulting  in  this  dis 
tinct  achievement.  The  first  word  my  hand  thus 
wrote  was  "  sherry." 

That  it  was  going  to  write  "  sherry  "  I  had  no 
idea.  To  this  point  I  had  been  incredulous  that  it 


72  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

would  actually  write  anything  at  all.  ' '  Sherry  " 
once  written,  I  began  to  feel  more  interest  in 
what  it  might  write  next.  And  then  soon  fol 
lowed  an  experience  that  determined  me  to  give 
the  matter  up.  In  the  first  place,  I  found  that 
experiments  in  automatic  writing  left  me  in  an 
irritable  nervous  condition  for  which  I  can  find 
no  better  name  than  demoralized.  The  whole 
fibre  of  character  seemed  for  the  moment  weak 
ened  ;  will,  intelligence,  self-control,  temper, 
were  alike  inferior  things  after  the  experiments 
to  what  they  had  been  before.  In  the  second 
place,  I  found  that  very  soon  I  could  not  be  quite 
sure  whether  I  actually  let  my  hand  run  un- 
guided,  or  whether  I  slyly  helped  it  write.  And 
whenever  that  doubt  arose  in  my  mind,  there  al 
ways  came  with  it  so  strong  an  impulse  to  deny 
its  existence,  to  assert  that  I  had  no  idea  what  I 
was  about,  that  I  found  myself  for  the  moment 
a  completely  untrustworthy  witness.  In  other 
words,  the  further  I  got  in  my  very  slight  excur 
sion  into  occult  experiment,  the  further  I  was 
from  intelligence,  veracity,  and  honesty.  The 
definite  result  of  these  experiments  for  me  was  a 
conviction  that,  at  any  rate,  no  man's  word  about 
automatic  writing  is  worth  the  breath  that  ut 
ters  it.  The  thing  is  not  all  fraud — there  is 
something  very  queer  about  it ;  but  not  the  least 
phase  of  the  queerness  is  that  it  is  constantly,  in 
creasingly  credulous,  tricky,  and  mendacious. 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  73 

In  reflecting  on  these  three  experiences,  I 
found  them  by  and  by  grouping  themselves  as 
three  stages  of  what  I  may  call  a  specific  mental 
or  moral  disorder.  The  first  and  simplest  was  the 
automatic  writing  whose  ill  effects  induced  me  to 
abandon  the  whole  thing.  The  second  was  the 
mediumistic  trance,  in  which  a  woman  whom  I 
believe  honest  in  her  natural  character  hypno 
tized  herself,  and  in  the  hypnotic  state  became 
perhaps  abnormally  perspicacious,  and  almost 
certainly  a  dangerous  charlatan.  The  third  was 
the  elaborately  dishonest  mummery  of  material 
ization,  where  the  fraud  was  so  palpable  that  it 
seemed  almost  indubitably  deliberate  from  begin 
ning  to  end.  But  comparing  this  deliberate  fraud 
with  the  simpler  phases  of  occultism  that  I  had 
observed,  I  found  myself  more  and  more  disposed 
to  believe  it  a  kind  of  deliberate  fraud,  in  all  re 
spects  debasing,  into  which  I  could  easily  con 
ceive  an  originally  honest  person  to  be  unwitting 
ly  led. 

Ill 

ALL  this  time  my  impressions  of  Salem  witch 
craft  had  been  derived  from  two  absorbing  days 
that  I  had  passed  with  Mr.  Upham's  book  some 
years  ago.  It  had  never  occurred  to  me  to  ques 
tion  his  conclusions  ;  nor  would  it  have  occurred 
to  me  had  I  not  been  called  on  to  make  a  careful 
study  of  the  life  and  character  of  Cotton  Mather, 


74  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

whom  I  found  on  intimate  acquaintance  by  no 
means  the  deliberate  villain  I  had  been  led  to  be 
lieve  him.  In  making  that  study,  I  had  occasion 
to  read  the  original  evidence  in  the  witch-trials.* 
And  what  most  impressed  me  in  that  evidence 
was  its  startling  familiarity.  The  surroundings 
were  in  all  respects  different  from  anything  I 
had  known.  In  a  century  and  a  society  far  more 
remote  from  us  in  condition  than  they  are  in 
time,  certain  unhappy  people  were  bringing 
against  others  more  unhappy  still  charges  that 
involved  their  lives.  But  the  controlling  spirit, 
the  atmosphere  of  this  grotesque  tragedy  was 
something  I  had  known  in  the  flesh.  Whoever 
has  frequented  materialization  seances,  and  who 
then  reads  with  sympathetic  imagination  the 
broken  records  of  the  witch-trials,  can  hardly 
help  admitting,  I  think,  that  these  things  are  of 
the  same  kind.  There  is  fraud  in  both — terribly 
tragic  fraud  then,  grotesquely  comic  fraud  now — 
but  in  both  the  fraud  is  of  the  same  horrible 
vapourous  kind ;  and  in  both  there  is  room  for 
a  growing  doubt  whether  there  be  not  in  all  this 
more  than  fraud  and  worse.  If  there  be,  that 
mysterious  thing  is  subtly  evil  beyond  words  ;  if 
there  be  an  incarnate  spirit  of  evil,  then  that  mys 
terious  thing  is  the  direct  work  of  that  spirit. 

*  Woodward,  W.  E.  Records  of  Salem  Witchcraft, 
1691-92,  copied  from  the  original  documents.  Roximry, 
1864-05,  2  vols  ,  4to.  (Woodward's  Hist.  Ser.,  vols.  1,  2.  ) 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  75 

The  Nineteenth  Century  has  discarded  the  Devil ; 
to  the  Seventeenth  Century,  at  least  in  New  Eng 
land,  he  was  just  as  real  as  God.  And  the  sin 
that  transcended  all  other  sin  that  could  be  done 
by  the  fallen  children  of  Adam  was  the  sin  of 
those  who,  despairing  of  Heaven,  leagued  them 
selves  before  their  time  with  Hell. 

This  is  not  the  moment  to  analyze  in  detail  the 
tremendous  force  of  that  doctrine  of  election 
which  underlies  Calvinism — the  creed  that  for 
seventy  years  dominated  New  England.  But 
whoever  would  understand  the  society  from 
whose  midst  sprang  the  witches  and  the  witch- 
judges  of  1G92  must  never  forget  the  grim  creed 
which,  declaring  that  no  man  could  be  saved  but 
by  the  special  grace  of  God,  and  that  the  only 
test  of  salvation  was  ability  to  exert  the  will  in 
accordance  with  His,  bred  in  the  devout,  and  in 
whoever  was  affected  by  their  counsels,  an  habit 
ual  introspection,  and  an  habitual  straining  for 
mystical  intercourse  with  the  spiritual  world,  to 
day  almost  inconceivable.  In  a  world  dominated 
by  a  creed  at  once  so  despairing  and  so  mystic,  it 
would  not  have  been  strange  if  now  and  then 
wretched  men,  finding  in  their  endless  introspec 
tion  no  sign  of  the  divine  marks  of  grace,  and 
stimulated  in  their  mysticism  beyond  modern 
conception  by  the  churches  that  claimed  and 
imposed  an  authority  almost  unsurpassed  in  his 
tory,  had  been  tempted  to  seek,  in  premature 


76  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

alliance  with  the  powers  of  evil,  at  least  some 
semblance  of  the  freedom  that  their  inexorable 
God  had  denied  them.  It  was  such  an  alliance 
with  which  the  Salem  witches  were  charged.  It 
is  just  such  miserable  debasement  of  humanity  as 
should  follow  such  an  alliance  that  pervades  the 
evidence  of  the  witch-trials,  just  as  to-day  it 
pervades  the  purlieus  of  those  who  give  them 
selves  up  to  occultism  in  its  lower  forms. 


IV 


THE  question  I  asked  myself,  when  this  view 
of  the  matter  became  clear  to  me,  was  whether  in 
this  evidence  I  could  find  traces  of  the  other 
stages  of  occultism  to  which  I  have  already  called 
your  attention.  To  answer  this  question  to  any 
body's  satisfaction  would  need  longer  and  more 
careful  study  than  I  have  been  able  to  give  the 
documents ;  but  what  little  study  I  have  had 
time  for  has  suggested  to  me,  more  and  more 
strongly,  that  prolonged  study  might  yield  sur 
prising  results.  I  will  try  very  briefly  to  analyze 
the  evidence,  to  show  what  I  mean. 

It  is  not  generally  remembered,  in  spite  of 
Mr.  Upham's  admirable  work,  that  the  great  bulk 
of  this  evidence  is  what  was  called  spectral.  A 
girl,  for  example,  was  bewitched,  and  testified 
that  the  physical  torture  she  was  apparently 
undergoing  was  caused  by  the  conduct  of  the 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  77 

apparition  of  one  of  the  accused — an  apparition 
providentially  invisible  to  whoever  was  not  be 
witched.  It  was  the  acceptance  by  the  court  of 
this  obviously  worthless  evidence  that  hanged 
the  witches;  it  was  the  throwing  out  of  such 
evidence  that  brought  the  witch-trials  to  a  close. 
It  was  his  momentary  faith  in  such  evidence — 
not  in  the  horrible  reality  of  witchcraft  itself — 
that  Samuel  Sewall  publicly  repented  in  the  Old 
South  Church.  And  in  analyzing  the  records  of 
these  old  trials,  we  must  put  aside,  once  for  all, 
every  particle  of  spectral  evidence,  except  as  it 
tells  against  the  witnesses  themselves. 

In  a  way,  however,  spectral  evidence  tells  against 
the  witnesses  themselves  rather  startlingly.  It 
was  often  accompanied  in  full  court,  by  conduct 
that  went  far  to  make  judges  and  attendants 
believe  it.  I  cite  almost  at  random,  a  single 
example  of  what  I  mean.  In  the  examination  of 
Rebecca  Nurse  is  this  passage  :  * 

u  Why  should  not  you  also  be  guilty  for  your  apparition 
doth  hurt  also. 

"Would  you  have  me  bely  myself. 

41 8he  held  her  neck  on  one  side,  and  accordingly  so  were 
the  afflicted  taken" 

A  moment  later — "  Nurse  held  her  neck  on  one  side  and 
Eliz.  Hubbard  (one  of  the  sufferers)  had  her  neck  set  in 
that  posture  whereupon  another  patient  Abigail  Williams, 
cryed  out,  set  up  Goody  Nurse's  head,  the  maid's  neck 
will  be  broke,  and  when  some  set  up  Nurse's  head  Aa- 

*  1 :  86,  87. 


78  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

ron  Wey,  observed  yl  Betty  Hubbards  was  immediately 
righted." 

This  tells  nothing  whatever  against  Eebecca 
Nurse.  What  it  tells  against  Betty  Hubbard 
would  have  seemed  a  few  years  ago  merely  that 
she  was  a  deliberate  and  unprincipled  trickster. 
To-day,  I  think,  it  goes  far  to  suggest  a  much 
less  simple  state  of  things ;  namely,  that  Betty 
Hubbard  was  a  hypnotic  subject,  so  far  gone  as 
to  be  instantly  affected  by  the  slightest  suggestion 
from  a  person  on  whom  her  diseased  attention 
was  concentrated.  And  it  is  typical  of  things  that 
occurred  throughout  the  sessions  of  the  witch- 
courts.  I  am  no  expert  in  hypnotism,  but  what 
little  I  have  read  and  seen  of  it  so  exactly  corre 
sponds  with  so  much  that  is  in  this  witch-evidence 
that  I  should  be  gravely  surprised  if  experts 
who  examined  the  evidence  did  not  find  the  evi 
dence  going  far  to  suggest  that  almost  all  the 
bewitched  were  probably  victims  of  hypnotic  ex 
cesses. 

It  is  only  in  recent  times,  I  believe,  that  care 
ful  study  of  the  still  mysterious  and  dangerous 
phenomena  of  hypnotism  has  tended  to  show  that 
it  depends  far  more  on  the  subject  than  on  the 
operator,  and  that  a  good  subject,  by  careful  con 
centration  of  attention,  can  hypnotize  himself. 
That  the  bewitched  sufferers  at  Salem  often 
hypnotized  themselves  is  highly  probable.  Here 
is  another  extract  from  the  evidence — this  time 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  79 

from  one  of  those  unaccountable  confessions  which 
have  so  baffled  cool  critics.* 

"Now  Mary  Warren  fell  into  a  fit,  and  some  of  the 
afflicted  cryed  out  that  she  was  going  to  confess,  but  Goody 
Korey  and  Procter  and  his  wife  came  in  their  apparition 
and  struck  her  down  and  said  she  should  tell  nothing. 

"  Mary  Warren  continued  a  good  space  in  a  fit,  that  she 
did  neither  see,  nor  hear,  nor  speak. 

"Afterward  she  started  up,  and  said  I  will  speak  and 
cryed  out,  Oh  !  I  am  sorry  for  it,  I  am  sorry  for  it,  and 
wringed  her  hands  and  fell  a  little  while  into  a  fit  again 
and  then  came  to  speak,  but  immediately  her  teeth  were 
set,  and  then  she  fell  into  a  violent  fit  and  cryed  out,  Oh 
Lord  help  me  !  Oh  Good  Lord  save  me  ! 

"  And  then  afterward  cryed  again,  I  will  tell,  I  will  tell 
and  then  fell  into  a  dead  fit  again  " —  which  continued 
until  "  she  was  ordered  to  be  had  out." 

A  little  later  she  was  "called  in  afterward  in  private 
before  magistrates  and  ministers. 

"  She  said  I  shall  not  speak  a  word  ;  but  I  will  I  will 
speak  Satan. — She  saith  she  will  kill  me.  Oh  !  she  says 
she  owes  me  a  spite  and  will  claw  me  off. 

"Avoid  Satan,  for  the  name  of  God  Avoid  and  then  fell 
into  fits  again  ;  and  cryed  will  ye,  I  will  prevent  ye  in  the 
name  of  God." — 

But  in  spite  of  her  will,  her  fits  persisted  and  "  her  lips 
were  bit  so  that  she  could  not  speak  so  she  was  sent  away." 

Within  two  days  she  made  an  elaborate,  and 
apparently  mendacious  confession  of  all  sorts  of 
occult  absurdity,  beginning  with  the  assertion 
that  her  master  and  mistress  had  forced  her  into 

*1 : 120. 


80  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

witchcraft,  making  her  sign  a  book,  and  that  they 
had  made  her  stick  a  pin  into  a  puppet,  and  so  on. 

Though  not  disposed  to  put  much  credence  in 
this  testimony  against  her  employers,  I  am  never 
theless  very  much  struck  by  the  likeness  between 
this  poor  creature's  conduct  before  the  Salem 
magistrates  and  ministers,  and  the  conduct  of  the 
trance-medium  in  Boston,  who,  as  she  was  emerg 
ing  at  my  request  from  her  trance,  begged  me  to 
save  her  from  the  horrible  spectre  she  thought  she 
saw  in  the  corner.  This  medium  was  undoubt 
edly  given  to  hypnotizing  herself.  How  she  had 
learned  to  do  so  I  do  not  know.  Is  there  not 
reason  to  guess  that  Mary  Warren  may  have  been 
given  to  hypnotizing  herself,  too ;  and  that  very 
possibly  she  may  have  been  taught  to  do  so  ? 

In  the  midst  of  all  this  horrible  confusion,  then, 
there  are  glimpses  of  two  of  the  stages  of  occult 
ism  to  which  I  bore  personal  testimony.  Is  there 
any  of  the  third,  such  as  I  dabbled  in  myself? 
Of  automatic  writing,  I  have  found  no  trace  ;  that 
experiment  I  conceive  to  be  a  very  modern  one. 
But  here  is  what  poor  Giles  Corey  testified  against 
his  wife :  * 

"  Last  Satturday  in  the  Evening  Sitting  by  the  fire  my 
wife  asked  me  to  go  to  bed.  I  told  her  I  would  go  to 
prayer  and  when  I  went  to  prayer  I  could  not  utter  my 
desires  wh  any  sense,  not  open  my  mouth  to  speake^  my 
wife  did  perceive  itt  and  came  toward  me  and  said  she 

*  1  :  55-56.  I  These  italics  are  mine. 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  81 

was  coming  to  me.  After  this  in  a  little  space  I  did  ac 
cording  TO  MY  MEASURE  attend  the  duty  .  .  .  My 
wife  hath  ben  wont  to  sett  up  after  I  went  to  bed  and  I 
have  perceived  her  to  kneel  doun  on  the  harth  as  if  she 
were  at  prayer  but  heard  nothing." 

A  mere  question  of  temper,  if  you  please  ;  but 
if  be  had  set  about  to  describe  an  elementary  hyp 
notic  experiment,  could  he  have  said  much  other 
wise  ?  And  is  that  kneeling  figure  at  the  hearth, 
in  the  flickering  firelight  of  two  centuries  ago, 
quite  godly  in  aspect  ? 

Again :  * 

"John  Blye  Senior  agett  about  57  yeers  and  William 
Blye  aged  about  15  years  both  of  Salem  Testifieth  and 
sayth  yt  being  Imployed  by  Bridgitt  Boshop  Alies  Oliuer 
of  Salem  to  helpe  take  doune  ye  Cellar  wall  of  The  Owld 
house  she  formerly  Lived  in  wee  ye  sd  Deponents  in  holes 
in  ye  sd  owld  wall  belonging  to  ye  sd  Cellar  found  seuerall 
popitts  made  up  of  Raggs  And  hoggs  Brussells  wth  head- 
les  pins  in  Them,  wth  ye  points  outward  and  this  was 
about  Seaven  years  Last  past." 

Children's  toys,  to  a  nineteenth-century  mind. 
But  all  through  the  records  of  mediaeval  witch 
craft  and  magic  lie  just  such  children's  toys  which 
the  world  believed  very  fatal  engines  of  death.  I 
spoke  of  that  testimony  the  other  day  to  a  friend 
who  happens  to  be — what  I  am  far  from  being — 
an  ardent  believer  in  that  prevalent  mysticism 
called  Christian  Science.  To  me,  I  said,  the  evi- 

*  1 :  163. 
6 


82  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

dence  went  a  good  way  to  show  that  somebody 
had  actually  been  trying  in  Salem  to  see  whether 
by  sticking  pins  into  a  doll  you  could  not  torture 
the  enemy  that  the  doll  represented ;  the  practice 
certainly  had  existed  in  Europe,  absurd  as  it  must 
seem  to  us.  To  my  surprise,  my  friend  replied 
that  to  her  it  did  not  seem  absurd  at  all  ;  any  be 
liever  in  Christian  Science,  she  went  on,  knew 
that  by  concentrating  your  mind  on  an  absent 
person  you  could  affect  that  person  for  good  or 
for  ill ;  and  that  while  the  actual  sticking  of  pins 
into  dolls  could  never  directly  hurt  anything  but 
the  dolls,  it  could  help  a  malevolent  mind  so  to 
concentrate  itself  on  the  person  a  doll  represented 
as  to  injure  him  with  far  less  effort  than  when 
there  was  no  doll  to  aid  it ;  which  view,  she 
added,  was  the  view  of  Paracelsus. 

I  mention  that  case  just  to  remind  you  how 
curiously  some  of  the  educated  minds  of  our 
own  time  are  recurring  to  kinds  of  mysticism 
that  have  so  long  seemed  purely  superstitious ; 
how  much  more  credible  witchcraft  is  than  it 
used  to  be,  now  that  we  see  these  honest,  intelli 
gent  mystics  all  about  us. 

For  only  change  the  impulse  of  these  very 
people  from  the  pure  one  it  generally  is,  to  the 
base  one  that  was  held  to  actuate  the  witches, 
and  you  have  at  your  very  firesides  not  a  few  ex 
amples  of  what  witches  were.  And  do  not  the 
silenced  husband  of  Martha  Corey,  and  the  pin- 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  83 

riddled  dolls  hidden  in  Bridget  Bishop's  cellar 
wall  go  at  least  a  little  way  to  suggest  that  per 
haps  they  had  made  unholy  experiments? 

Only  a  little  way,  I  hasten  to  add.  No  one  can 
be  better  aware  than  I  that  such  evidence  as  I  have 
offered  here  is  very  slight— at  best  not  more  than 
suggestive.  Nor  can  anyone  know  better  than  I 
what  I  cannot  too  earnestly  repeat,  that  I  have 
neither  the  scientific  nor  the  historical  learn 
ing  necessary  to  make  anything  I  should  say 
more  than  suggestive  to  better  and  wiser  stu 
dents.  But  this  evidence,  typical  of  much  more 
that  can  be  dug  out  of  those  bewildering  old 
documents,  will  show  you  the  sort  of  thing 
that  has  led  me  both  to  believe  that  there  was 
abroad  in  1692  an  evil  quite  as  dangerous  as  any 
still  recognized  crime,  and  to  wonder  whether 
some  of  the  witches,  in  spite  of  the  weakness  and 
falsity  of  the  evidence  that  hanged  them,  may  not 
after  all  have  deserved  their  hanging. 


IT  remains  for  me  to  show  why  I  believe  this 
evil  so  serious  and  the  crime  of  whoever  com 
mitted  it  in  the  seventeenth  century  so  gross.  I 
cannot  do  so  better  than  by  repeating  some  words 
I  published  a  few  months  ago  :  * 

If,  as  modern   science   tends  to  show,   human 

*  In  my  Life  of  Cotton  Mather,  yp.  1)5-06. 


84  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

beings  are  the  result  of  a  process  of  evolution 
from  lower  forms  of  life,  there  must  have  been 
in  our  ancestral  history  a  period  when  the  in 
telligence  of  our  progenitors  was  as  different 
from  the  modern  human  mind  as  were  their  re 
mote  aquatic  bodies  from  the  human  form  we 
know  to-day.  It  seems  wholly  conceivable,  then, 
that  in  the  remote  psychologic  past  of  our  race 
there  may  have  been  in  our  ancestors  certain 
powers  of  perception  which  countless  centuries 
of  disuse  have  made  so  rudimentary  that  in  our 
normal  condition  we  are  not  conscious  of  them. 
But  if  such  there  were,  it  would  not  be  strange 
that,  in  abnormal  states,  the  rudimentary  ves 
tiges  of  these  disused  powers  of  perception  should 
sometimes  be  revived.  If  this  were  the  case,  we 
might  naturally  expect  two  phenomena  to  accom 
pany  such  a  revival :  in  the  first  place,  as  such 
powers  of  perception  belong  normally  to  a  period 
in  the  development  of  our  race  when  human  so 
ciety  and  moral  law  have  not  yet  appeared,  we 
should  expect  them  to  be.  intimately  connected 
with  a  state  of  emotion  that  ignores  the  moral 
sense,  and  so  to  be  accompanied  by  various  forms 
of  misconduct ;  in  the  second  place,  as  our  chief 
modern  means  of  communication  — articulate  lan 
guage — belongs  to  a  period  when  human  intelli 
gence  has  assumed  its  present  form,  we  should 
expect  to  find  it  inadequate  for  the  expression  of 
facts  which  it  never  professed  to  cover,  and  so 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  85 

we  should  expect  such  phenomena  as  we  are  con 
sidering  to  be  accompanied  by  an  erratic,  impo 
tent  inaccuracy  of  statement,  which  would  soon 
shade  into  something  indistinguishable  from  de 
liberate  falsehood.  In  other  words,  such  phenom 
ena  would  naturally  involve,  in  whoever  abandons 
himself  to  them,  a  mental  and  moral  degeneracy 
which  anyone  who  believes  in  a  personal  devil 
would  not  hesitate  to  ascribe  to  the  direct  inter 
vention  of  Satan. 

Now  what  disposes  me,  scientifically  a  layman 
I  cannot  too  earnestly  repeat,  to  put  faith  in  this 
speculation  concerning  occultism  is  that  mental 
and  moral  degeneracy — credulity  and  fraud — seem 
almost  invariably  so  to  entangle  themselves  with 
occult  phenomena  that  many  cool-headed  persons 
are  disposed  to  assert  the  whole  thing  a  lie.  To 
me  it  does  not  seem  so  simple.  I  incline  more 
and  more  to  think  that  necromancers,  witches, 
mediums — call  them  what  you  will — actually  do 
perceive  in  the  infinite  realities  about  us  things 
imperceptible  to  normal  human  beings  ;  but  that 
they  perceive  them  only  at  a  sacrifice  of  their 
higher  faculties — mental  and  moral — not  inaptly 
symbolized  in  the  old  tales  of  those  who  sell 
their  souls. 

If  this  be  true,  such  an  epidemic  of  witchcraft 
as  came  to  New  England  in  1692  is  as  diabolical 
a  fact  as  human  beings  can  know ;  unchecked,  it 
can  really  work  mischief  unspeakable.  For  un- 


86  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

checked  it  would  mean  that  more  and  more  hu 
man  beings  would  give  themselves  up  to  delib 
erate,  or  perhaps  instinctive,  effort  to  retrace  the 
steps  by  which  human  intelligence,  in  countless 
centuries,  has  slowly  risen  from  the  primitive 
consciousness  of  the  brute  creation. 

VI 

To  my  mind,  then,  the  fatally  tragic  phase  of 
the  witch  trials  is  not  that  there  was  no  evil  to 
condemn,  but  that  the  unhappy  victims  of  the 
trials  were  condemned  literally  on  clairvoyant  evi 
dence.  And  what  I  have  already  said  shows  that 
in  all  probability  those  really  guilty  of  the  name 
less  crime  I  have  tried  to  indicate  were,  in  my 
opinion,  not  so  often  the  witches  as  the  bewitched. 

But  let  us  look  ab  the  matter  a  little  more 
closely  again.  These  wretched  bewitched  girls 
were  in  all  probability  victims  of  hypnotic  ex 
cess.  In  all  probability  they  had  learned,  will 
ingly  or  unwillingly,  to  hypnotize  themselves. 
Is  there  not  a  likelihood,  then,  that  first  of  all  they 
may  have  been  hypnotized  by  others?  And  is 
there  not,  in  the  records  of  those  terrible  days, 
some  faint  suggestion  that  among  those  who  first 
dragged  the  wretched  girls  down  may  have  been 
some  of  the  accused?  The  actual  charges  are 
sometimes  manifestly  false,  almost  always  utterly 
incredible  —lying,  contradictory,  vapourous — but 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  87 

beneath  them  all  there  remains  a  something 
which  would  make  me  guess  that  not  all  of  the 
accused  believed  themselves  innocent. 

Put  yourself  for  a  moment  in  the  place  of  those 
petty  New  England  Calvinists,  born  and  bred  un 
der  an  iron  creed  that  forbade  all  hope  of  salva 
tion  to  any  but  the  elect  of  a  capricious  God. 
Fancy  yourself  toiling  for  years  in  vain  to  make 
your  human  will  agree  with  His,  to  find  in  your 
self  the  divine  marks  of  grace.  Then  fancy  your 
self,  in  a  moment  of  despair,  toying  with  occult 
experiment — not  as  a  scientific  observer  of  the 
Nineteenth  Century,  but  as  a  creed-ridden  zealot 
of  the  Seventeenth,  bound  to  believe  that  mysteri 
ous  phenomena  are  the  direct  handiwork  of  either 
God  or  Satan.  Fancy  yourself  finding  that  you 
could  exercise  over  other  and  weaker  wills  than 
yours,  that  power  which,  under  the  name  of 
hypnotism,  scientific  folks  are  studying  to-day, 
and  not  a  few  of  them  denouncing  as  terribly 
dangerous.  Fancy  yourself  finding  that  the  more 
you  exercised  this  power  the  more  your  victims 
yielded  to  it.  Remember  the  debasement  and 
the  fraud  that  come  as  hardly  resistible  tempta 
tions  to  dabblers  in  occultism  to-day.  And  then 
ask  yourselves  if  anyone  who  yielded  himself  up 
in  old  Salem  to  such  temptations  as  these,  could 
have  doubted  that,  in  the  Devil's  mysterious  way, 
he  was  doing  the  Devil's  chosen  work. 

I  cannot  assert  a  single  one  of  the  dead  witches 


88  THE  SALEM  WITCHES 

to  have  been  such  a  figure  as  I  have  asked  you  to 
fancy.  But  I  can  assert  that  if  any  of  them  were 
by  chance  such  a  figure — and  it  seems  to  me 
that  careful  study  might  go  far  to  show  that  more 
than  one  of  them  may  have  been — then  the 
dreadful  fate  that  came  to  him,  though  it  came 
through  evidence  hopelessly  weak  and  false,  was 
his  moral  due. 

VII 

I  HAVE  said  enough  to  suggest  to  you  the  view 
of  Salem  witchcraft  that  has  forced  itself  on  me. 
From  personal  observation  I  have  seen  enough  of 
modern  occultism,  of  the  lower  kind,  to  believe 
it  unholy.  From  the  evidence  of  the  witch-trials 
I  have  gathered  hints  enough  to  make  me  believe 
that  beneath  its  horrible  vapourous  confusion  lurks 
just  such  unholiness  as  I  have  seen  in  the  flesh. 
And  no  one  who  knows  a  bit  of  the  inner  history 
of  New  England  Puritanism  can  doubt  that  if  this 
be  true,  then  there  were  in  old  Salem  men  and 
women  who  had  deliberately  sinned  against  God. 
I  have  told  all  this  in  a  manner  that  may  well 
have  seemed  too  personal,  too  assertive  of  myself. 
I  have  chosen  to  .tell  it  thus  deliberately.  No 
one  can  be  better  aware  than  I  that,  to  be  proved, 
such  views  as  I  have  suggested  need  the  full 
authority  that  should  come  from  years  of  scientific 
and  of  historical  research.  No  one  can  know 
better  than  I  how  far  I  am  from  such  learning  as 


THE  SALEM  WITCHES  89 

should  give  my  words  authority.  But  sometimes, 
I  think,  a  frank  statement  of  how  an  old  matter 
looks  to  a  fresh  eye  that  glances  at  it  never  so 
superficially,  may  suggest  to  eyes  familiar  with 
it,  views  that  their  very  familiarity  would  have 
prevented  them  from  seeing  for  themselves.  Such 
a  service  as  this  is  among  the  best  that  men  of 
letters  can  do  for  men  of  learning.  And  it  is  only 
as  one  who  has  tried  to  make  himself  a  man  of  let 
ters  that  I  have  earned  the  privilege  of  telling 
here  not  what  is  known  of  old  Salem,  but  what 
seems  to  me  perhaps  knowable. 

One  reflection  I  shall  venture  to  add.  It  is 
customary  to  regard  the  witch-trials  as  histori 
cally  unimportant,  except  as  a  dreadful  example 
of  human  delusion.  If  the  views  presented  in 
this  paper  are  valid,  however,  the  witch  -  trials, 
far  from  being  fruitless,  may  have  accomplished 
a  result  of  lasting  importance  in  the  history  of 
New  England.  There  was  little  more  playing 
with  occultism  here,  I  think,  until  modern  spirit 
ualism  arose,  to  be  followed  by  the  excessive  in 
terest  in  occult  matters  so  notable  within  the  last 
ten  years.  It  seems  more  than  possible,  then,  that 
the  witch-trials,  surrounding  the  whole  subject 
with  horror,  may  actually  have  checked  for  more 
than  a  century  the  growth  of  a  tendency  which 
unchecked,  in  the  formative  period  of  our  na 
tional  life,  might  gravely  have  demoralized  our 
national  character. 


\ 


V 
AMEKICAN  LITEEATUEE 


[An  Address  made  at  Vassar  College,  on  January  !27, 1893.] 


AMEKICAN  LITEEATUKE 


AMONG  the  Christmas-cards  that  lately  filled  the 
windows  of  Cambridge  shops  was  one  that  clearly 
distinguished  itself  from  the  rest.  Quite  large 
enough  to  frame,  it  included  six  oval  passe-par 
touts;  and  from  these,  executed  with  conven 
tional  flattery,  gazed  six  heroic  faces  :  the  faces 
of  Emerson,  Longfellow,  Lowell,  Whittier,  Haw 
thorne^  and  Dr.  Holmes.  In  the  midst  of  chromo- 
lithographed  angels,  stars  of  Bethlehem,  belfries, 
snow-storms,  grotesques,  these  six  worthies  of 
New  England  were  pleasant  things  to  look  at.  In 
the  midst  of  mere  conventions  any  fact  not  yet 
lifelessly  conventional  is  a  pleasant  thing,  and 
surely  an  American  can  hardly  look  at  those  six 
faces  without  a  feeling  of  pride.  Here  are  men 
of  our  own  blood  and  almost  of  our  own  time, 
men  whom  any  of  us  that  has  reached  the  thresh 
old  of  middle  age  might  have  known  well. 
Only  one  of  them  is  with  us  still,  but  the  others 
are  gone  only  a  little  before.  We  shall  all  pass 
together  into  that  shadowy  future  where  the 
generations  shall  merge.  In  a  sense,  then,  these 


94  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

men  are  our  leaders ;  and  they  are  noble  leaders 
to  follow.  Whatever  their  shortcomings,  what 
ever  their  errors,  the  world  rarely  affords  the 
spectacle  of  such  a  group  :  silently  chosen  from 
among  their  fellows  for  honest  work  honestly 
done,  honest  words  honestly  spoken,  these  men, 
as  we  study  their  lives,  triumphantly  prove  how 
nearly  stainless  human  manhood  may  be. 

In  certain  moods,  one  goes  on  to  say,  this  is 
answer  enough  for  whoever  still  questions  the 
claim  of  American  literature  to  a  place  among 
the  literatures  of  the  ages.  In  such  moods  one 
has  only  to  look  at  these  faces,  to  utter  these 
names.  The  questioner  whom  these  will  not 
silence,  one  feels,  is  a  questioner  "who  will  never 
accept  an  answer.  We  know  the  lives  of  these 
men  ;  and  no  lives  were  ever  better.  We  know 
their  work,  which  any  man  may  look  at.  That 
is  enough.  Let  us  trust  posterity. 

Posterity  will  judge ;  that  is  certain.  It  will 
judge,  too,  with  unthinking  impartiality— with 
out  acrimony,  without  tenderness.  What  man 
kind  wants  or  needs  it  will  preserve  and  remem 
ber  ;  what  mankind  finds  useless  it  will  cast  aside 
and  forget.  That  is  what  makes  the  past  seem 
heroic  to  all  eyes  not  unduly  sharpened  by  the 
engines  of  science.  "  It  is  the  sin  and  the  tumult 
and  the  passion  of  human  life  that  die.  En 
shrined  in  art  the.  beauty  of  the  old  days  lives, 
and  it  will  live  forever."  And  even  though 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  95 

science  nowadays  teach^us  the  suggestive  truth 
that  the  old  days  which  we  have  reverenced  were 
after  all,  when  the  sun  still  shone  on  them,  days 
of  turbulence  and  wickedness  disheartening  as 
any  that  surges  about  us  now,  that  same  science, 
one  often  thinks,  is  prone  to  forget  the  deep  law 
of  human  nature  which  makes  each  generation,  in 
the  end,  remember  instinctively  of  those  that  are 
gone  before  only  or  chiefly  those  traits  and  deeds 
which  shall  add  to  the  wisdom  and  the  power  of 
humanity. 

So  from  among  the  written  records  of  past  time 
the  posterity  of  which  you  and  I  are  part  has  un 
wittingly  selected  some  which  are  of  lasting  value. 
These  we  call  literature.  What  literature  con 
tains  for  us  already,  nobody  quite  knows  as  yet. 
Modern  learning,  they  say,  at  last  exploring  the 
mysteries  of  the  East,  discerns  and  reveals  to  us 
more  and  more  records,  unknown  to  us  for  cen 
turies  amid  what  used  to  seem  the  outer  darkness 
of  India  or  China,  from  which  perhaps  we  of  the 
Western  world  may  by  and  by  glean  things  worth 
having.  But  our  own  possessions  are  already 
rich.  Wo  have  the  great  literature  of  the  He 
brews  ;  we  have  the  literatures  of  Greece  and 
Rome,  the  literatures  of  Italy  and  Spain,  and 
France,  and  Germany,  and  England.  It  is  to 
this  list  that  we  so  confidently  try  to  add  our  own 
literature  of  America. 

Already,  our  confidence  seems  less  certain  than 


96  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

when  we  were  considering  by  themselves  the  six 
worthies  of  New  England.  Already  we  begin  to 
see  that,  discarding  all  literatures  but  those  of 
Europe,  there  is  a  group  of  great  figures  among 
whom  Homer  and  Dante  and  Shakespeare  are 
perhaps  supreme,  but  only  in  a  great  company  of 
notable  personages  pressing  closely  about  them. 
It  is  in  such  company  as  this  that  we  claim  place 
for  Emerson,  and  Longfellow,  and  Lowell,  and 
Whittier,  and  Hawthorne,  and  Holmes.  Very 
clearly,  we  cannot  claim  it  as  confidently  as  when 
at  first  we  only  looked  at  their  faces  and  remem 
bered  their  lives.  To  be  confident  at  all,  in  fact, 
one  way  or  the  other,  we  must  hesitate.  We 
must  ask  ourselves  first  what  literature  is;  then 
by  what  right  any  men  or  any  people  may  claim 
a  place  in  its  history  or  its  hierarchy  ;  and  final 
ly,  what  these  heroes  of  ours  and  our  other  fel 
low-countrymen  have  done  to  make  good  the 
claim  that  we  rather  urge  for  them  than  they  for 
themselves. 

II 

LITERATURE,  then,  we  may  perhaps  define  as 
the  lasting  expression  in  words  of  the  meaning  of 
life. 

Whatever  our  philosophy,  we  must  admit  that 
to  every  conscious  being  life  presents  itself  as 
an  endlessly  interwoven  web  of  impressions  to 
which  we  give  the  names  thought  and  emotion. 


AMEKICAN  LITERATURE  97 

What  things  are  in  themselves  no  philosophy  has 
finally  settled ;  but  how  things  present  them 
selves  to  human  intelligence  even  the  vulgar  in 
stinctively  know,  each  for  himself.  This  instinc 
tive  knowledge,  this  fundamental  sense  of  the 
reality  of  thought  and  emotion  which  each  of  us 
possesses,  which  all  of  us  share  in  common,  grows, 
as  we  contemplate  it,  more  and  more  wonderful. 
Our  senses  bring  to  our  intelligence  images  of 
material  things, — commonplace,  beautiful,  repel 
lent.  Some  faculty  within  us  brings  to  our  in 
telligence  conceptions  of  pleasure  and  of  pain,  of 
utility  and  of  danger,  of  good  and  of  evil.  To 
each  of  us,  even  before  he  is  grown  old  enough 
to  talk,  this  great  panorama  of  human  experience 
is  a  thing  that  has  already  begun  to  impress  him 
somehow.  In  what  seems  inextricable  confusion, 
he  is  aware  of  something  not  himself  that  defines 
itself  in  a  thousand  phantasmagoric  forms,  end 
lessly  awakening  in  him  those  myriad  reactions 
that  together  make  the  individuality  by  which  he 
is  known  to  others.  These  impressions  and  these 
reactions  slowly  group  themselves.  By  and  by 
one  comes  to  know  some  of  them  as  hateful,  some 
as  noble,  some  as  alluring.  By  and  by  one  grows  / 
to  feel  that  some  of  these  should  be  sought,  some 
repelled.  High  or  low,  good  or  evil,  spiritual 
or  material,  ideals  declare  themselves.  At  most 
times  we  are  merely  aware  of  this  vast  web  of  ex 
perience  weaving  itself  inexorably  about  our  in- 
7 


98  AMEEICAN  LITERATURE 

telligence  from  without  and  from  within.  When, 
at  rare  moments,  we  pause  to  contemplate  it, 
we  generally  contemplate  it  only  in  fragments. 
There  are  other  moments,  far  more  rare,  when 
for  awhile  we  try  to  contemplate  it  as  a  whole. 
When  thus,  deliberately  or  instinctively,  we  pause 
to  contemplate  life,  in  whole  or  in  its  smallest  part, 
we  are  sure  to  discover  that  what  we  contemplate 
impresses  us  in  a  way  peculiar  to  itself  and  to  us. 
In  other  words,  it  has  a  meaning,  be  that  meaning 
only  a  transient  sense  of  vulgar  pleasure  or  pain, 
or  be  it  what  we  deem  the  nobler  conceptions  of 
philosophy  or  religion.  And  this  meaning,  which 
we  have  power  to  express,  is  the  substance  of 
which  all  art,  and  so  all  literature,  is  made. 

We  have  power  to  express  it,  to  share  it  with 
others.  This  power  we  are  always  exerting — in 
every  word  we  utter,  in  every  quiver  of  muscle 
that  tells  the  unending  story  of  human  pleasure 
and  pain,  grief  and  joy.  Most  of  our  expressions, 
incalculably  most,  are  trivial  things  and  pass 
ing,  little  more  significant  than  the  purrs  or  the 
whines  of  animals  that  we  are  fond  of  calling 
lower  than  ourselves.  Sometimes,  however,  in 
stinctively  or  deliberately,  men  express  the  mean 
ing  of  life  in  a  way  that  is  not  quite  trivial  or 
passing.  In  plastic  form,  from  the  scratched 
bones  of  prehistoric  caverns  to  the  splendour  of 
Periclean  Athens  or  the  Italy  of  the  Medici,  there 
have  been  records  of  what  human  eyes  have  seen 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  99 

that  make  humanity  permanently  richer.  In 
music,  from  the  twanging  bowstring  of  savages  to 
the  (ethereal  orchestra  of  Beethoven  or  of  Wag 
ner,  there  have  been  such  records  of  what  human 
~ears  have  heard.  This  protean  meaning  of  life 
has  phases  that  are  lasting,  the  record  of  which, 
by  whoever  is  fortunate  enough  or  great  enough  to 
perceive  them,  is  permanently  significant.  Such 
records,  such  expressions  as  these  are  what  make 
each  generation  richer  in  the  possession  of  more 
and  more  experiences  which  the  inexorable  con 
ditions  of  space  and  of  time  have  forbidden  them 
in  the  flesh.  Sometimes  these  records  have  a  sig 
nificance  chiefly  sympathetic,  declaring  through 
the  centuries  how  men  have  been  men  from  old 
est  time.  Sometimes  they  actually  reveal  to  us 
aspects  of  life  which  otherwise  we  might  never 
have  known.  Sympathetic  or  enriching,  these 
records  which  are  permanently  significant,  these 
expressions  of  the  meaning  of  life  which  are 
lasting,  are  the  body  of  all  art,  and  so  of  all  liter 
ature. 

Of  these  lasting  expressions  of  the  meaning  of 
life,  some,  as  we  have  seen,  are  in  plastic  form, 
bearing  their  message,  in  architecture,  in  sculpt 
ure,  in  painting,  to  whoever  having  eyes  will  see ; 
some,  in  the  form  of  music,  bear  their  message  to 
whoever  having  ears  will  hear.  Some,  however, 
and  these  perhaps  the  most  definitely  significant, 
phrase  themselves  not  in  these  forms,  which  the 


100  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

laws  of  human  nature  render  in  each  generation 
practicable  only  by  the  few  who  are  born  with 
the  power  of  mastering  them ;  but  in  that  other 
form,  not  more  easy  of  mastery  though  so  incal 
culably  more  familiar  in  practice,  by  which  hu 
man  beings  are  agreed  to  conduct  the  affairs  of 
daily  life.  It  is  such  lasting  expressions  of  the 
meaning  of  life  as  these — such  lasting  expressions 
as  are  phrased  in  words — to  which  we  give  the 
name  literature. 

Ill 

BY  what  right,  was  our  second  question,  may 
any  man  or  any  people  claim  a  serious  place  in 
the  history  of  literature  or  in  its  hierarchy  ?  Be 
fore  we  try  to  answer  this  with  certainty,  I  think, 
we  shall  do  well  to  consider  perhaps  the  most 
notable  feature  of  the  vehicle  which  literature 
employs — the  chief  characteristic  of  words. 

Lines  and  colours,  the  vehicles  of  the  plastic 
arts,  are  essentially  imitative ;  whoever  has  looked 
at  nature  can  recognize  in  the  work  of  architect, 
sculptor,  or  painter  the  effort  to  make  its  literal 
or  conventional  image.  The  very  vagueness,  the 
intangible  sethereality  of  the  emotions  most  fitly 
phrased  by  the  melodies  and  the  harmonies  of 
music  make  these  melodies  and  harmonies  elu- 
sively,  mysteriously  intelligible  to  whoever  has 
felt  the  experience  that  gave  them  birth.  Words, 
however,  though  we  use  them  so  constantly  that 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  101 

we  hardly  know  ourselves  in  other  than  verbal 
terms,  are  neither  imitative,  like  lines  and  colours, 
nor  inevitable  as  the  strains  of  music.  Essential 
ly  their  meaning  is  as  arbitrary  as  that  of  the  let 
ters  by  which  we  have  agreed  to  symbolize  them. 
Instinctively  fit  as  the  words  seem  by  which  you 
and  I  exchange  our  thoughts,  we  all  know  that 
they  are  meaningless,  except  after  months  or 
years  of  study,  to  anyone  whose  native  tongue  is 
not  English ;  and  we  have  only  to  glance  at  any 
obvious  monument  of  Roman  antiquity — at  the 
Arch  of  Constantino,  for  -example — to  feel  the 
difference  between  the  lastingly  intelligible  plas 
tic  form  in  which  imperial  power  was  expressed, 
and  the  puzzling  obscurity  of  even  the  simplest 
inscription  phrased  in  terms  no  longer  used  by 
human  beings.  Intelligible  to  those  who  are 
agreed  to  use  them,  these  arbitrary  symbols  that 
we  call  words  have  no  nieaningto  those  who  have 
not  learned,  by  environment  or  by  study,  what 
meaning  has  been  attached  to  them  by  the  tacit 
consent  of  those  by  whom  they  are  used.  Arbi 
trary,  intelligible  only  to  those  whom  chance  or 
effort  has  made  masters  of  them,  Ihese  words 
which  literature  employs  to  express  the  lasting 
meaning  of  life  vary  with  every  language  that 
human  beings  have  grown  to  use.  According  as 
we  know  language  or  not,  then,  literature  is  either 
the  most  familiar  of  arts  or  the  most  unmeaning. 
This  very  diversity  of  languages,  however,  se- 


102  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

riously  as  it  must  limit  the  range  and  the  pow 
er  of  any  single  literature,  greatly  extends  the 
range  and  the  power  of  literature  in  its  broader 
sense.  No  commonplace,  when  one  considers, 
is  much  more  pregnant  than  that  which  asserts 
the  inevitable  discrepancy  between  the  number 
of  ideas  that  form  part  of  every  man's  experience 
and  the  number  of  words  at  his  disposal  to  name 
them.  It  is  a  large  dictionary  that  contains  a 
hundred  thousand  words  ;  and  a  copious  author 
who  uses  of  these  above  ten  or  twelve  thou 
sand.  Yet  the  varying  experiences  even  of  a  sin 
gle  conscious  day  might  almost  be  numbered 
by  millions.  At  best,  the  vocabulary  of  any  lan 
guage  names  only  in  a  tentative,  approximate  way 
the  thoughts  and  emotions  it  recognizes.  At 
best,  any  grammar  expresses  the  relations  of  these 
ideas  within  very  narrow  limits.  In  the  hurried 
intercourse  of  every  day  we  are  too  busy,  our  per 
ceptions  too  much  blunted  by  habit,  to  be  aware 
of  how  little  beyond  the  experiences  common  to 
every  day  the  language  at  our  disposal  will  ex 
press.  But  try  for  a  moment  to  phrase  any  idea 
not  quite  familiar,  try  to  impress  even  your  most 
familiar  idea  on  some  one  to  whom  it  is  strange, 
and  you  are  face  to  face  with  the  inevitable  in 
adequacy  of  language  to  do  more  than  faintly 
symbolize  the  immaterial  reality  of  thought  and 
emotion  that  you  know  within  yourself.  What  is 
thus  true  of  us  as  individuals  is  true  of  those 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  103 

races,  as  races,  that  have  agreed  to  use  a  com 
mon  tongue.  Try  to  translate  the  simplest  words 
from  the  languages  most  intimately  connected 
with  ours  —  ennui,  for  example,  or  blase  —  and  you 
will  often  find  that  though  we  know  just  what 
they  mean  we  have  no  name  of  our  own  by  which 
English-speaking  folks  have  agreed  to  express  it. 
Try  to  translate  the  title  of  Dante's  "  Convito"  : 
you  will  say  feast,  but  feast  combines  for  us  no 
two  words  that  mean  by  themselves  a  living  to 
gether.  These  trite  illustrations  are  enough. 
nanion  idnas  in  n 


its  own.  The  common  agreement  on  arbitrary 
symbols  that  at  length  results  in  the  vocabulary 
of  any  language  is  sure  to  produce  symbols  that 
stand  for  peculiar  aspects  of  the  real  thought  and 
emotion  which  language  tries  to  define  —  for  as 
pects,  in  other  words,  which  differ  from  those 
named  by  any  other  tongue.  And  what  is  thus 
plainly  true  of  words  by  themselves  is  just  as  true 
of  words  in  combination.  The  difficulty  we  find 
in  mastering  a  foreign  grammar  is  more  than  for 
mal  ;  each  foreign  grammar  defines  in  ways  of  its 
own  relations  of  thought  which  our  grammar 
neglects,  and  neglects  meanwhile  relations  that 
our  grammar  defines.  "What  can  express  in  Eng 
lish,  for  example,  the  relations  so  definitely  ex 
pressed  by  the  inflections  of  Latin  or  of  Greek  ? 
What  in  Latin  or  Greek  the  almost  sexual  gender 
of  English  ?  In  its  vocabulary,  in  its  grammar, 


104  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

in  its  entirety,  each  language  must  express  the 
lasting  meaning  of  life  in  aspects  different  from 
those  expressed  by  any  other.  Limited  as  the 
range  of  any  one  language  must  be,  then,  or  of 
any  one  literature,  the  range  of  language  and 
literature,  in  their  broadest  sense,  may  be  called 
almost  limitless. 

A  growing  sense  of  this  perhaps  underlies  the 
impatience  of  some  modern  scholars  with  the  old 
classification  of  literature.  The  notion  of  na 
tional  literatures,  they  feel,  is  artificial,  archaic. 
It  were  better  to  gather  all  literature  together,  to 
study  it  comparatively,  neglecting  the  accident  of 
phrase,  looking  rather  at  the  growing,  developing 
range  of  thought  and  emotion  that  the  combined 
literatures  of  the  ages  express.  In  this  feeling 
there  is  much  that  commands  one's  sympathy. 
Words  as  words  are  dead  things — arbitrary  sym 
bols  incredibly  less  meaning  in  themselves  than 
the  lines  of  plastic  art  or  the  strains  of  music. 
The  pedantry  that  so  enshrouds  linguistic  learn 
ing,  too,  even  in  its  innermost  strongholds,  makes 
these  dead  words  often  seeni  farther  from  vitality 
than  in  fact  they  are.-  Yet  no  impatience  with 
artificiality,  with  archaism,  with  pedantry,  can 
conceal  in  the  end  the  actual  fact  that  underlies 
the  old  classification  of  national  literatures.  Each 
national  literature  expresses  'the  lasting*  meaning 
of  life  in  its  own  peculiar  language;  and  each 
language,  we  have  seen,  names  the  innumerable 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  105 

phenomena  of  life  in  aspects  and  in  combinations 
that  to  a  greater  degree  or  a  less,  every  other 
language  neglects.  In  the  nature  of  language  it 
seems  inherently  necessary  that  as  each  new 
tongue  develops  to  a  point  where  it  can  lastingly 
express  the  meaning  of  life  it  must  express  that 
meaning  in  a  manner  of  its  own. 

We  can  answer  our  question  better  now.  By 
what  right,  we  asked,  may  any  man  or  any  people 
claim  a  serious  place  in  the  history  of  literature  or 
in  its  hierarchy?  In  its  history,  we  may  say,  by 
one  of  two  rights  :  \either  by  expressing  in  words 
some  phase  of  the  lasting  meaning  of  life  which 
words  have  not  hitherto  expressed ;  or  by  ex 
pressing  some  known  phase  of  that  meaning  in 
words  more  lasting  than  those  which  have  hitherto 
expressed  it.  In  the  hierarchy  of  literature,  we 
may  go  on  to  say,  a  serious  place  can  be  claimed 
only  when  both  rights  are  combined — when  a  man 
or  a  people  has  given  to  the  world  an  expression 
of  the  meaning  of  life  at  once  new  and  final. 

It  is  for  expressing  a  strange,  dreamy,  fleeting 
poetry  of  feeling  that  people  are  tardily  accord 
ing  a  place  in  the  history  of  literature  to  the 
vanished  poetry  of  the  British  Celts.  It  is  for  a 
vague,  half-slumbrous  sense  of  Titanic  awakening 
— God  knows  to  what  end — that  many  are  to-day 
disposed  to  accord  such  a  place  to  the  new  litera 
ture  of  Russia.  It  is  for  startling  flashes  of  in 
sight  through  the  murky  shams  of  modern  con- 


106  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

vention  that  of  late  it  lias  been  the  fashion  to 
claim  such  a  place  for  Henrik  Ibsen,  and  chiefly 
by  right  of  his  genius  for  the  literature  of  Nor 
way.  To  pass  to  greater  things,  it  is  not  for  fresh 
ness  of  thought  but  for  unsurpassed  power  of 
condensation  and  epigram  that  we  may  most  cer 
tainly  claim  such  a  place  for  the  ultimately  com 
pact  literature  of  the  Latin  tongue.  It  is  for  a 
sense  of  order,  of  lucidity,  of  amenity  unequalled 
in  any  other  modern  language  that  so  many  ac 
cord  the  first  place  in  contemporary  literature  to 
the  literature  of  France. 

To  pass  to  greater  things  still,  the  literature  of 
the  Hebrews  most  of  us  know  only  in  the  modern 
versions  by  which,  since  the  time  of  Luther,  it 
has  become  the  great  motive  force  of  the  Protes 
tant  world  ;  but  as  version  after  version  adds  each 
something  to  our  composite  notion  of  what  the 
fact  that  all  stand  for  must  be,  not  a  few  of  us  are 
willing  to  believe  that  in  its  native  form  that 
literature,  expressing  spiritual  truths  as  none  has 
expressed  them  since,  may  well  be  such  as  to  give 
colour  to  the  old  dreams  of  verbal  inspiration. 
The  literature  of  Greece  is  half  closed  to  men  of 
our  time  by  the  transitional  pedantry  that  in  our 
school-days  has  passed  for  education ;  yet  even 
we  can  appreciate  it  enough  to  know  that  in  its 
native  form  it  expresses  its  meaning  with  an  ex 
quisitely  modulated  precision  not  to  be  dreamed 
of  by  those  who  know  it  only  in  the  guise  of 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  107 

translation ;  and  those  who  know  it  only  thus 
seem  more  and  more  aware  that  even  to  them  it 
phrases,  in  a  way  that  nothing  can  supplant,  the 
view  of  life  which  has  made  so  many  thoughtful 
generations  deem  the  word  classic  only  less  sacred 
than  the  word  holy.  So  far,  perhaps,  I  have 
spoken  hearsay.  There  are  two  supreme  writers 
— Dante  and  Shakespeare — whom  it  has  been 
my  own  fortune  to  know  from  the  very  wards 
they  wrote.  And  as  the  years  pass  I  realize 
for  myself  more  and  more — as  all  who  know  su 
preme  things  must  realize — why  such  work  as 
theirs  were  alone  enough  to  give  a  lasting  place 
in  the  hierarchy  of  literature  to  the  languages  in 
which  each  has  finally  expressed  a  meaning  of  life 
which  before  him  none  had  quite  perceived  and 
after  him  none  need  phrase. 

We  have  doubtless  seemed  to  stray  from  our 
subject,  from  America.  Yet  with  less  general 
consideration  we  should  hardly  have  been  able  to 
discuss  American  literature  fairly.  For  in  all 
fairness  we  are  bound  to  admit  that  only  by  such 
rights  as  we  have  tried  to  define  may  any  man  or 
any  people  claim  a  serious  place  in  the  history  of 
literature  or  in  its  hierarchy. 

IV 

THE  question  that  is  left  us  is  becoming  more 
definite.  Have  we  Americans  as  a  people,  or 


108  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

have  men  among  us  as  individuals  made  good 
any  claim  to  a  serious  position  in  literature  ?  To 
put  the  question  bluntly,  What  does  American 
literature  amount  to  ? 

We  should  be  able  to  see  that  the  question  is 
not  easy  to  answer  off-hand ;  that  the  fine,  if 
over-sensitive  patriotism  which  so  often  impels  us 
to  assert  that  our  literature  amounts  to  pretty 
much  all  creation,  is  little  more  reasonable  than 
the  still  more  sensitive  reaction  from  such  patriot 
ism,  which  makes  some  of  us  occasionally  feel 
like  saying  that  it  does  not  amount  to  anything. 
The  question  is  really  one  of  simple  fact ;  but  of 
simple  fact  that  is  rather  hard  to  get  hold  of.  In 
all  the  other  literatures  we  have  touched  on  there 
is  one  important  trait  which  ours  obviously  lacks. 
Celtic  Britain,  Russia,  Norway,  Rome,  France, 
have  had  each  a  language  of  its  own ;  so  have  the 
Hebrews,  and  Greece,  and  Italy,  and  England. 
The  one  fact  which  we  must  definitely  admit  about 
ourselves  is  that  for  better  or  worse  we  think 
and  speak  in  English.  There  are  things  called 
"  Americanisms,"  of  course,  frequently  discover 
able  only  in  dictionaries  compiled  elsewhere  than 
in  America.  There  is  hardly  one  of  the  United 
States,  however,  whose  current  speech  is  so  far 
.removed  from  the  normal  standard  of  literary 
English  as  is  the  dialect  of  Devonshire  or  of 
Yorkshire.  Whatever  we  have  of  our  own,  we 
have  as  yet  no  distinct  language.  When  we  ask 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  109 

if  we  have  an  American  literature,  then,  we  really 
mean  to  inquire  whether  as  a  people  or  as  indi 
viduals  we  have  added  anything  distinctively  our 
own,  in  thought  or  in  phrase,  to  that  lasting  ex 
pression  in  words  of  the  meaning  of  life  which  is 
the  common  property  of  the  English-speaking 
world. 


IN  considering  this  question  we  may  conven 
iently  remind  ourselves  of  the  broad  facts  of  our 
national  history.  The  facts  of  national  history 
are  the  memoranda  of  national  experience.  If  in 
these  we  find  experiences  peculiarly  ours,  we 
shall  have  found  at  least  the  material  for  a  na 
tional  literature,  whether  we  have  used  it  or  not. 

Briefly,  then,  we  may  say  that  our  national  his 
tory  covers  about  two  hundred  and  fifty  years ; 
that,  broadly  speaking,  it  is  the  history  of  a 
series  of  emigrations  from  a  highly  civilized, 
overcrowded  world, — in  the  beginning,  to  a  wil 
derness  where  there  was  plenty  of  room,  and  un 
til  very  lately  to  a  continent,  still  unsettled  in 
every  sense  of  the  word,  where  the  material  prob 
lems  of  life  have  presented  themselves  much  less 
definitely  than  in  Europe.  Broadly  speaking,  the 
earlier  of  these  emigrations  were  remarkable  for 
excellence  of  personal  quality ;  among  the  settlers 
of  New  England,  for  example,  the  proportion  of 
people  who  amounted  to  something,  cannot  fail 


110  AMERICAN  LITEEATUEE 

to  impress  whoever  studies  the  documents  they 
have  left  us.  For  nearly  two  centuries  these  emi 
grations  were  not  remarkable  either  for  excellence 
of  personal  quality  or  for  badness ;  they  com 
prised  good,  every-day  people  whom  any  decent 
community  could  absorb  without  danger.  Dur 
ing  the  greater  part  of  our  own  lifetimes  the 
quality  of  these  emigrations  has  again  become  re 
markable,  until  one  may  guess  that  not  a  few 
native  American  hearts  were  tempted  to  greet 
with  un-Christian  enthusiasm  even  the  epidemic 
cholera  which  lately  checked,  though  only  for  a 
little  while,  the  influx  of  degradation  that  had 
been  swirling  upon  us  from  every  moral  and 
political  pest-hole  in  Europe  and  Asia.  Broadly 
speaking,  the  motive  of  the  first  emigration  to 
New  England — the  emigration  whose  traditions 
have  most  profoundly  affected  our  national 
thought — was,  in  the  words  of  Richard  Mather,  a 
desire  to  remove 

"  from  a  place  where  all  the  ordinances  of  God  cannot  be 
enjoyed  unto  a  place  where  they  may  ;  " 

in  other  words,  the  Puritan  fathers  were  prepared 
to  make  any  sacrifice  for  the  purpose — profoundly 
human  in  spite  of  all  their  godliness — of  manag 
ing  their  affairs,  temporal  and  spiritual,  in  their 
own  way.  Broadly  speaking,  the  successive  emi 
grants  not  personally  noteworthy,  who  for  two  cen 
turies  or  so  added  their  energies  to  those  of  the 
fathers  and  their  direct  descendants,  came  hither 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  111 

for  the  purpose  of  making  their  fortunes.  The  I 
unhappily  remarkable  emigration  of  the  last  gen 
eration  seems  to  have  been  impelled  by  a  purpose 
less  definite  than  these ;  but  it  is  not  easy  to  dis 
cover  for  such  unfortunate  people  as  now  swarm 
about  us  any  much  more  useful  function  in 
human  society  than  the  making  of  mischief. 
Broadly  speaking,  then,  the  social  aspect  of  our 
national  history  shows  us  first  a  people  remark 
able  for  self-assertion  and  singularly  free  from 
the  problems  which  the  struggle  for  life  presents 
in  any  densely  populous  community ;  secondly, 
a  people  whom  this  very  freedom  permits  to 
attain,  with  less  concentrated  effort  than  others, 
a  remarkable  degree  of  rather  irresponsible  ma 
terial  prosperity ;  and,  finally,  a  people  whose  very 
prosperity  has  brought  upon  them,  in  their  New 
"World,  almost  precisely  the  problems  which  un 
til  lately  they  have  prided  themselves  upon  hav 
ing  escaped  or  solved. 

Politically,  our  national  history  is  even  a  more 
familiar  commonplace.  It  begins  with  the  devel 
opment  of  communities  geographically  remote 
from  the  centre  of  power  to  a  degree  now  incon 
ceivable,  and  by  this  very  fact  both  permitted 
and  compelled  to  develop  real  centres  of  power 
within  themselves.  It  proceeds  through  that 
great  struggle  for  national  independence  and 
unity  in  which  all  the  mists  of  philanthropic  and 
rhetorical  bombast  that  now  obscure  it  cannot 


112  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

conceal  the  victory  of  reality  over  sliam,  of  facts 
over  words  and  theories.  It  comprises  that  terri 
ble  experience  of  national  distemper  when  with 
in  ourselves  two  systems  that  could  not  coexist 
fought,  each  nobly,  to  the  death.  It  finds  us 
now  face  to  face  with  the  world-old  problem,  new 
only  to  us  among  the  nations,  of  how  when  the 
struggle  for  life  grows  fierce,  human  power  can 
preserve  those  things  which  are  good  and  repress 
those  which  are  evil. 

In  our  discussion  of  American  literature,  we 
may  best  put  the  present  aside.  And  this  for 
more  reasons  than  one.  Our  present  and  our 
future,  for  one  thing,  differ  little  from  the  pres 
ent  and  the  future  of  all  European  humanity. 
If  we  face  our  problems  differently,  it  is  not 
because  the  problems  themselves  are  different, 
but  because  our  two  or  three  centuries  of  Ameri 
can  experience  have  made  us  other  than  we 
should  have  been  had  we  remained  with  our 
kindred  across  the  Atlantic.  Again,  no  man  can 
fitly  estimate  himself,  nor  can  any  period  ;  it  is  as 
if  a  soldier  or  a  captain,  ignorant  of  his  general's 
knowledge  and  plans,  tried  to  tell  in  the  midst 
of  a  campaign  its  whole  history  and  significance. 
And  less  certainly,  but  more  powerfully,  a  feeling 
perhaps  sentimental  but  not  fleeting,  makes  some 
of  us  dread  to  seek  or  to  recognize  in  the  actual 
world  of  which  you  and  I  are  part  actual  signs  of 
a  great,  lasting  record  of  its  meaning.  For  one 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  US 

sometimes  thinks  that  the  history  of  fine  art,  in 
all  its  phases,  teaches  a  lesson  that  the  lovers  of 
fine  art  dread  to  learn.  Such  expressions  of  the 
meaning  of  life  as  prove  lasting,  one  feels  in  such 
moods,  are  the  final  expressions  of  states  of  things 
almost  past.  In  such  moods,  the  stories  of  the 
Athens  of  Pericles,  of  the  Rome  of  Augustus 
Caesar,  of  the  Italy  of  Raphael  and  of  Michael 
Angelo,  of  the  England  of  Shakespeare,  seem  the 
same;  and  these  names  seem  to  name  only  in 
stances  of  an  inexorable  law.  The  end  of  man, 
one  feels  like  saying,  is  expression ;  but  expres 
sion  is  just  as  truly  the  end  of  man.  The  songs 
that  live  are  the  swan-songs. 

Aspiration  to  make  all  our  art  fine  —  all  our 
records,  of  every  kind,  lasting  and  beautiful — is 
surely  a  noble  thing.  Not  to  foster,  not  to  en 
courage  such  aspiration  is  just  as  surely  igno 
ble.  But  there  are  moods  in  which  such  aspira 
tion  seems  something  like  earthly  preparation  for 
heaven.  The  best  of  us  are  really  best  because 
they  are  constantly  preparing  themselves  for 
what  inevitably  must  come.  When  the  time  for 
heavenly  glory  comes,  of  course,  or  for  great  artis 
tic  expression,  it  is  only  those  who  are  best  by  the 
noblest  standards  of  human  experience  that  are 
anything  like  ready.  If  on  earth  or  in  heaven, 
then,  we  of  America  are  ever  to  be  lastingly  noble, 
we  must  never  relax  our  effort  always  to  be  as 
noble  as  we  can  ;  but  the  very  end  we  hope  for 
8 


114  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

is  an  end  that  at  the  same  time  we  dread.  As 
lovers  of  art  we  may  well  regret  that  among  our 
selves  we  find  at  this  moment  no  expression  of 
what  this  actual  life  of  ours  means  which  forces 
itself  upon  us  as  undoubtedly  lasting.  As  patri 
ots,  though,  and  as  human  beings  who  love  with 
out  knowing  why  this  actual  state  of  life  that 
for  a  little  while  is  ours,  we  may  take  comfort  in 
the  thought  that  our  vital  energies  as  a  people 
are  still  thoughtlessly  engaged  in  action,  not  yet 
thoughtfully  or  recklessly  in  contemplation  or  in 
expression.  There  are  few  surer  warrants  of  the 
soundness  of  our  national  youth. 

Our  real  meaning,  then,  when  we  ask  what 
American  literature  amounts  to,  is  this  :  Have  we 
lasting  expressions  of  the  meaning  of  the  past 
periods  of  American  life,  in  words  which  have 
added  either  thought  or  phrase  to  the  literature 
of  the  English  language  ? 

VI 

THE  fathers  of  New  England  were  almost  as 
prolific  in  mind  as  in  body.  The  fate  of  their  in 
tellectual  offspring,  too,  resembled  that  of  their 
physical  —  generally  it  did  not  survive.  And 
tradition,  remembering  chiefly  the  titles  of  their 
sermons  and  their  pamphlets  and  their  treatises, 
much  as  it  remembers  the  extremely  Christian 
names  of  their  children,  reports  their  work  as 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  115 

godly,  narrow,  dull,  dreary,  fruitless — anything, 
in  short,  that  should  repel  a  reader. 

In  a  way,  they  have  been  unduly  abused. 
People  nowadays  know  so  little  of  what  Seven 
teenth-Century  Yankees  actually  wrote,  that  it  is 
perhaps  worth  our  while  to  consider  a  bit  of  Sev 
enteenth-Century  Yankee  narrative.  It  is  from 
Cotton  Mather's  "  Magnalia,"  where  it  closes  his 
account  of  Theophilus  Eaton,  the  first  Governor 
of  New  Haven : 

u  His  eldest  son  he  maintained  at  the  Colledge  until  he 
proceeded  master  of  arts  ;  and  he  was  indeed  the  son  of  his 
vows  and  liojies.  But  a  severe  catarrh  diverted  this  young 
gentleman  from  the  work  of  the  ministry  whereto  his 
father  had  once  devoted  him  ;  and  a  malignant  fever  then 
raging  in  those  parts  of  the  country,  carried  him  off  with 
his  wife  within  two  or  three  days  of  one  another.  This 
was  counted  the  sorest  of  all  the  trials  that  ever  befel  his 
father  in  the  '  days  of  the  years  of  his  pilgrimage  ; '  but  he 
bore  it  with  a  patience  and  composure  of  spirit  which  was 
truly  admirable.  His  dying  son  looked  earnestly  on  him, 
and  said,  '  Sir,  what  shall  we  do  ?  '  Whereto,  with  a  well- 
ordered  countenance,  he  replied,  '  Look  up  to  God  ! '  And 
when  he  passed  by  his  daughter,  drowned  in  tears  on  this 
occasion,  to  her  he  said,  '  Remember  the  sixth  command 
ment  :  hurt  not  yourself  with  immoderate  grief  :  remember 
Job,  who  said,  "  The  Lord  hath  given,  and  the  Lord  hath 
taken  away ;  blessed  be  the  name  of  the  Lord  !  "  You 
may  mark  what  a  note  the  Spirit  of  God  put  upon  it ;  u  in 
all  this  Job  sinned  not,  nor  charged  God  foolishly  :  "  God 
accounts  it  a  charging  of  Him  foolishly,  when  we  don't 
submit  unto  His  will  patiently.'  Accordingly,  he  now 


116  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

governed  himself  as  one  that  had  attained  unto  the  rule  of 
'  weeping  as  if  we  wept  not ; '  for  it  being  the  Lord's  day, 
he  repaired  unto  the  church  in  the  afternoon,  as  he  had 
been  there  in  ihe  forenoon,  though  he  was  never  like  to  see 
his  dearest  son  alive  any  more  in  this  world.  And  though 
before  the  first  prayer  began,  a  messenger  came  to  prevent 
Mr.  Davenport's  praying  for  the  sick  person,  who  was  now 
dead,  yet  his  affectionate  father  altered  not  his  course,  but 
wrote  after  the  preacher  as  formerly  ;  and  when  he  came 
home  he  held  on  his  former  methods  of  divine  worship  in 
his  family,  not  for  the  excuse  of  Aaron,  omitting  anything 
in  the  service  of  God.  In  like  sort,  when  the  people  had 
been  at  the  solemn  interment  of  this  his  worthy  son,  he 
did  with  a  very  unpassionate  aspect  and  carriage  then  say, 
4  Friends,  I  thank  you  all  for  your  love  and  help,  and  for 
this  testimony  of  respect  unto  me  and  mine :  the  Lord  hath 
given,  and  the  Lord  hath  taken  :  blessed  be  the  name  of  the 
Lord  ! '  Nevertheless,  retiring  hereupon  into  the  chamber 
where  his  daughter  then  lay  sick,  some  tears  were  observed 
falling  from  him  while  he  uttered  these  words,  4  There  is 
a  difference  between  a  sullen  silence  or  a  stupid  senseless 
ness  under  the  hand  of  God,  and  a  child-like  submission 
thereunto. ' 

"Thus  continually  he,  for  about  a  score  of  years,  was 
the  fjlory  and  p  illar  of  New  Haven  colony.  He  would  often 
say,  '  Some  count  it  a  great  matter  to  die  well,  but  I  am 
sure  'tis  a  great  matter  to  live  well.  All  our  care  should 
be  while  we  have  life  to  use  it  well,  and  so  when  death 
puts  an  end  unto  that,  it  will  put  an  end  unto  all  our  cares.' 
But  having  excellently  managed  his  care  to  live  well,  God 
would  have  him  to  die  well,  without  any  room  or  time  then 
given  him  to  take  any  care  at  all ;  for  he  enjoyed  a  death 
sudden  to  every  one  but  himself  !  Having  worshipped  God 
with  his  family  after  his  usual  manner,  and  upon  some 
occasion  charged  all  the  family  to  carry  it  well  unto  their 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  117 

mistress  who  was  now  confined  by  sickness,  he  supped,  and 
then  took  a  turn  or  two  abroad  for  his  meditations.  After 
that  he  came  in  to  bid  his  wife  good-night,  before  he  loft 
her  with  her  watchers ;  which  when  he  did,  she  said, 
1  Methinks  you  look  sad  !  '  Whereto  he  replied,  '  The 
differences  risen  in  the  church  of  Hartford  make  me  so  ; ' 
she  then  added,  '  Let  us  even  go  back  to  our  native 
country  again  ; '  to  which  he  answered,  l  You  may  (and  so 
she  did),  but  I  shall  die  here.'  This  was  the  last  word 
that  ever  she  heard  him  speak  ;  for  now  retiring  unto  his 
lodging  in  another  chamber,  he  was  overheard  about  mid 
night  fetching  a.  groan  ;  and  unto  one  sent  in  presently  to 
enquire  how  he  did,  he  answered  the  enquiry  with  only 
saying,  '  Very  ill ! '  and  without  saying  any  more,  he  fell 
'asleep  in  Jesus,'  in  the  year  16-j7,  loosing  anchor  from 
New  Haven  for  the  better." 

A  shorter  extract  could  hardly  give  the  full 
effect  of  this  typical  Puritan  story.  It  is  very 
foreign  to  our  present  ways  of  thought  and 
speech.  Perhaps  it  deserves  all  the  epithets 
posterity  unthinkingly  gives  it — godly,  narrow, 
dull,  dreary,  what-not.  Yet  as  one  grows  familiar 
with  the  literature  for  which  it  may  fairly  stand 
representative,  one  finds  in  it  more  and  more  not 
only  a  certain  half-scriptural  charm  of  style,  but  a 
genuinely  interesting  record  of  human  experience. 
A  strangely  tense  life  it  shows  us,  dull  and  trivial 
externally,  commonplace  in  phrase,  but  in  its  es 
sence  intensely  idealistic.  This  Theophilus  Eaton 
is  a  man  to  whom  the  real  things  are  the  things 
unseen,  to  whom  things  seen  are  only  passing 


118  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

shows.  These  passing  shows,  moreover,  are  of  a 
very  simple  kind,  because  they  were  passing  not 
in  Cromwell1  s  populous  England  but  in  a  colony 
where,  after  all,  nothing  was  yet  actually  more  im 
portant  than  what  went  on  of  a  Sunday  at  church. 
Cotton  Mather,  the  writer  of  this  story,  lived  two 
generations  later ;  his  life,  in  fact,  was  spent  in 
fruitless  efforts  to  maintain  the  principles  that  his 
"Magnalia"  records — chief  among  which  was  the 
political  supremacy  of  the  clergy,  which  in  Eaton^ 
time  had  seemed  assured.  Cotton  Mather  lived  so 
late  that  in  his  prime  he  sent  a  letter  to  the  Spec 
tator,  or  at  least  planned  to  send  one,  for  there  is 
no  record  of  its  reception.  When  he  wrote  this 
life  of  Eaton,  Dryden's  work  was  almost  finished. 
This  contrast  is  what  most  impresses  one,  in 
the  literary  aspect  of  his  narrative.  The  style  has 
dignity,  character,  a  fine  rhythm  of  its  own ;  no 
other  could  tell  quite  so  well  the  story  of  what 
emigrant  Puritanism  meant.  But  in  England 
such  a  style  was  obsolete.  The  "  Magnalia  "  was 
published  in  the  Eighteenth  Century ;  body  and 
soul  it  is  a  book  of  the  Seventeenth.  That  sen 
tence  tells  the  whole  story.  Remote  from  tho 
great  world,  the  American  colonies  preserved,  in 
somewhat  fading  colours,  traditions  that  England 
had  outgrown.  /We  cannot  assert  that  either  in 
thought  or  in  phrase  they  actually  added  to  the 
literature  of  our  language  anything  which  that 
literature  did  not  already  possess. 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  119 

VII 

FOR  Puritanism,  -which  is  all  that  the  earlier 
literature  of  America  voices,  had  exponents 
enough  and  to  spare  in  England  itself.  The 
course  of  Puritanism  in  America,  however,  dif 
fered  from  its  course  in  the  mother  country. 
There,  its  dominant  power  was  short.  The  system 
of  Calvin,  to  be  sure,  states  the  problems  of  life 
with  a  fidelity  that  to-day  surprises  any  stranger 
who  has  known  the  system  only  by  distorted 
tradition,  or  by  verbal  dogmas  which  time  has 
stripped  of  their  vital  meaning  even  for  those  who 
utter  them.  Beneath  it  lies  a  profound,  lasting 
sense  of  the  actual  evils  which  life,  by  inexorable 
law,  is  bound  to  develop  in  any  dense  population. 
What  Calvinism  regarded  as  evidence  of  the  to 
tal  depravity  of  man,  indeed,  is  very  like  what 
modern  science  calls  the  struggle  for  existence. 
What  it  regarded  as  evidence  for  the  doctrine  of 
election  is  very  like  what  people  have  in  mind 
nowadays  when  they  talk  about  the  survival  of 
the  fittest.  Such  a  struggle  for  such  survival 
involves  a  good  many  problems,  material  and 
spiritual.  These  Calvinism  states  admirably ; 
but  it  is  one  thing  to  state  problems  and  an 
other  to  solve  them.  The  solution  which  Calvin 
ism  offers  is  not  one,  apparently,  which — true  or 
false — any  dense,  active  population  can  be  in 
duced,  for  any  length  of  time,  to  accept.  In 


120  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

England  the  facts  ou  which  the  dogmas  of  Pu 
ritanism  were  based  remained  ;  and  the  solution 
which  Puritanism  offered  broke  down.  In  Amer 
ica,  almost  to  our  own  time,  the  facts  have  been 
greatly  relaxed ;  and  the  Calvinistic  solution  re 
mained  for  generations  as  a  dogmatic  system, 
nominally  dominant,  but  really  losing  itself  more 
and  more  in  such  intricacies  of  logical  abstrac 
tion  as  men  will  generally  weave  for  themselves 
when  stern  fact  does  not  check  them. 

While  the  forgotten  theologians  of  our  first 
century  were  thus  making  the  logic  whose  ulti 
mate  monument  is  the  "  One-Hoss  Shay,"  the 
social  and  political  facts  of  American  history,  as 
we  have  seen,  were  pretty  steadily  developing 
themselves  in  the  direction  of  an  ideal  whose 
name  still  remains,  perhaps,  the  most  instinctive 
ly  inspiring  to  American  ears— the  ideal  of  inde 
pendence.  Socially,  men  were  discovering  that, 
if  they  neglected  the  theoretical  principles  of  tho 
fathers,  and  adhered  only  to  the  practical  principle 
of  insisting  upon  managing  their  affairs  in  their 
own  way,  they  could  so  manage  their  affairs  as  to 
make  themselves  in  the  end  a  good  deal  better 
off  than  they  were  in  the  beginning.  They  were 
really  started  on  that  road  to  fortune-making 
which  in  our  own  time  they  have  travelled  so  far 
as  gravely  to  disturb  some  of  our  contemporaries 
who  lag  behind  in  the  race.  Politically,  at  the 
same  time,  they  were  discovering  that  small, 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  121 

homogeneous  communities  can  really  manage 
their  public  business  much  better  than  anybody 
else  can  manage  it  for  them  ;  and  what  is  more, 
that  whether  they  can  or  not,  there  was  at  that 
period  no  choice.  Whence,  by  and  by,  common  ^ 
sense  began  apparently  to  confirm  sundry  vague 
notions  of  the  divine  rights  of  liberty  and  equality 
which  the  experience  of  our  heterogeneous  and 
overgrown  communities  makes  some  people  at 
present  think  less  axiomatic  than  of  old.  Mean 
while,  it  was  evident  to  whoever  calmly  observed 
American  human  nature  under  these  conditions, 
that  while  by  no  means  celestial  in  perfection,  it 
very  generally  developed  traits  which  did  not 
seem  necessarily  damnable.  Theology,  in  fact, 
originally  based  on  actual  experience,  was  insen 
sibly  separating  itself  from  experience ;  and  ex 
perience  was  reaching  fresh,  unforrnulated  con 
clusions  of  its  own. 

Hastily  as  we  have  considered  these  lines  of 
thought,  we  have  perhaps  seen  enough  to  account 
for  the  two  Americans  of  the  Eighteenth  Century 
whose  names  most  certainly  survive  in  the  history 
of  American  literature, — the  two  whose  thought 
was  most  surely  earnest  enough,  and  whose  phrase 
apt  enough,  to  be  read  still.  These  are  Jona 
than  Edwards  and  Benjamin  Franklin.  In  the 
passionate  effort  of  Edwards  to  revive  the  pristine 
force  of  orthodox  Calvinism,  the  theology  of  the 
fathers  reached  the  highest  point.  It  was  sincere, 


122  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

it  was  terribly  earnest,  it  was  almost  impregnably 
logical ;  but  it  was  so  highly  developed  that  even 
though  we  knew  nothing  of  its  circumstances  we 
might  shrewdly  guess  it  to  be,  like  so  many  great 
works  of  art,  essentially  a  thing  of  the  past.  In 
point  of  fact,  we  know  its  circumstances.  What  it 
thought  the  innate  depravity  of  human  nature  had 
so  flourished  along  with  it  that  Edwards  preached 
and  wrote  to  a  world  where  year  by  year  there 
were  more  and  more  men  who  felt  in  their  bones 
that  after  all  this  was  not  so.  In  that  very  world, 
too,  the  cool  common-sense  that  has  made  on  the 
whole  inefficient  the  later  efforts  of  Calvinistic 
logic  was  voiced  by  "  Poor  Richard,"  and  by  that 
sturdy  practical  life  of  Franklin's  whose  self- 
written  record  remains  among  the  best  narratives 
of  personal  experience  in  the  English  language. 

In  the  English  language,  we  must  remember, — 
the  English  language  that  is  ours.  Edwards  and 
Franklin  are  surely  figures  that  we  may  call  our 
own.  Almost  as  surely,  though,  they  are  figures 
that  English  literature  may  equally  claim./  In 
both  thought  and  phrase  they  may  have  added 
a  little  to  what  English  literature  already  pos 
sessed.  t/Tt  would  be  overbold,  however,  confi 
dently  to  assert  that  either  added  anything  more 
significant  than  an  indication  of  how  English 
human  nature  develops  itself  in  a  world  where 
there  is  still  room  enough  for  every  man  to  move 
freely. 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  123 

VIII 

FRANKLIN,  however,  is  far  more  than  a  merely 
literary  figure.  It  is  the  tradition  of  his  life  that 
has  survived  rather  than  any  wide  knowledge  of 
what  he  wrote.  No  figure  in  our  history  is  more 
generally  remembered,  nor  any  more  deservedly  ; 
for  whatever  his  merits  on  a  moral  scale,  the  man 
was  in  his  life  first,  last,  and  always  an  American. 
Shrewd  common-sense  never  had  a  more  palpable 
incarnation  ;  nor  that  peculiar,  ever-present,  not 
needlessly  obtrusive  personal  independence  which 
so  generally  makes  a  native  Yankee,  wherever  he 
goes,  a  troublesome  match  for  people  who  assume 
to  be  his  betters.  Himself,  then,  we  remember 
first ;  and  if  we  are  suddenly  asked  what  he  was 
besides  being  himself,  our  impulse  would  be  in 
conveniently  general  terms  to  answer  that  he  was 
a  statesman  and  a  philosopher. 

In  this  double  character,  more  than  in  any 
thing  he  actually  said  or  wrote,  Franklin  typi 
fies  something  beyond  the  rational  spirit  of  his 
own  time,  which  put  an  end  in  America  to  the 
dominance  of  theological  logic.  From  that  time 
to  ours  the  most  serious  expressions  of  Ameri 
can  thought  have  been  either  political  or  philo 
sophic.  Before  we  consider,  then,  those  later 
phases  of  American  literature  whose  purpose  is 
more  purely  artistic,  we  may  conveniently,  re 
mind  ourselves  first  of  the  political  literature, 


124:  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

then  of  the  philosophic,  and  finally  of  the  pecul 
iar  fusion  of  the  two  that  precede  and  surround 
them. 

IX 

FROM  the  middle  of  the  Eighteenth  Century  to 
a  time  that  we  ourselves  can  remember,  American 
public  men  produced  a  pretty  steady  flow  of  ora 
tory.  The  standard  speakers  that,  very  possibly, 
are  still  among  the  most  thumbed  text-books  of 
secondary  schools,  have  made  a  good  deal  of  this 
eloquence  household  words.  From  Patrick  Henry 
and  Otis  to  Daniel  Webster  and  the  dozens  of 
lesser  men  who  surrounded  him,  we  are  familiar 
with  endless  declamations  which  voice  with  vary 
ing  merit  the  patriotic  enthusiasm  and  vagaries 
of  American  independence.  Much  of  this,  at 
least  to  us  of  America,  seems  really  fine  and  stir 
ring  ;  much  of  it,  at  least  to  some  of  us,  is  begin 
ning  to  seem  rather  sonorous  than  significant.  Ul 
timately  true,  though,  or  ultimately  empty,  it  cer 
tainly  phrases,  with  spontaneous  enthusiasm,  the 
thoughts  and  emotions  which  at  critical  moments 
have  been  the  vital  forces  of  our  national  history  ; 
and  these  thoughts  and  emotions,  when  we  con 
sider  them  coolly,  appear  to  be  just  such  as  we 
should  expect  to  arise  among  the  conditions  of  life 
that  we  have  considered.  The  dominant  ideals 
that  j.-un  through  all  this  eloquence  are  the  ideals 
of  law  and  of  right.  These  are  not  very  clearly 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  125 

distinguished.  In  general,  there  seems  to  be  an 
underlying  feeling  that  if  by  any  chance  they  are 
not  identical  they  ought  to  be,  and  therefore  will 
be.  Anyhow,  we  ought  all  to  be  law-abiding,  and 
all  to  be  moral,  and  all  to  be  at  liberty  to  think 
and  to  behave  as  we  choose  within  the  obvious 
limits  of  law  and  morals.  And  what  we  ought  to 
be  we  mean  to  be  ;  and  that  is  American.  So,  be 
ing  Americans,  we  are,  generally  speaking,  pretty 
much  what  we  ought  to  be.  Incidentally,  then, 
we  are  always  in  the  right ;  and  whoever  disagrees 
with  us  is  consequently  and  obviously  wrong,  and 
ought  to  be  made  to  understand  it. 

In  this  summary  of  the  ultimate  impression  pro 
duced  by  the  patriotic  eloquence  of  our  country 
there  is  perhaps  a  suggestion  of  caricature ;  for 
the  summary  certainly  neglects  the  most  admira 
ble  emotional  trait  of  the  eloquence  in  question, 
— the  sincerity,  the  enthusiasm,  the  tremendous 
motive  power  of  such  convictions  as  it  phrases. 
In  less  critical  moods  one  finds  this  enthusi 
asm  heroically  contagious ;  this  eloquence  really 
seems  to  voice  the  meaning  of  life.  If  we  ask 
ourselves,  however,  what  phase  of  the  meaning 
of  life  it  lastingly  voices  our  answer  seems  in 
evitable  :  very  clearly  it  is/a  phase  of  human  ex 
perience  where  for  a  while  the  troublesome  press 
ure  of  external  fact  is  blessedly  relaxed. 

In  a  society  so  simple  as  ours  used  to  be,  one 
man  is  really  about  as  good  as  another.  The  ex- 


126  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

perience  of  the  generations  that  preceded  the 
American  Revolution,  one  may  almost  say  of  the 
generations  that  preceded  the  American  Civil  War, 
had  confirmed^  those  inspiring  doctrines  of  human 
equality  and  fraternity  which  in  realitv/we  learned 
rather  from  the  philosophical  vagaries  of  Eigh 
teenth-Century  France  than  from  the  practical  ex 
perience  we  inherit  from  law-abiding  England. 
Our  actual  conduct  was  generally  based  on  the 
sound  old  English  traditions  ;  our  words  and  our 
thoughts  were,  more  than  we  have  generally  real 
ized,  borrowed  from  the  cloud-spun  theories  of 
clever  Frenchmen.  We  have  never  yet  dreamed 
that  our  conduct  and  our  speech  do  not  agree ; 
and  at  the  period  we  are  now  considering — the 
period  that  gave  rise  to  the  great  century  of 
American  oratory — the  theories  that  our  oratory 
uttered  actually  came  far  nearer  to  correspond 
ence  with  fact  than  is  commonly  the  case  in  hu 
man  history.  Society  was  not  yet  complex  enough 
to  group  itself  in  distinct,  hostile  classes.  The 
only  men  who  were  really  dangerous  were  the 
men  who  were  not  law-abiding  or  not  good. 

Here,  then,  one  feels  like  saying,  is  at  least  one 
body  of  literature,  whatever  its  final  value,  that  is 
historically  American.  In  a  way  it  is.  But  turn  to 
those  very  standard  speakers  in  which  we  are  most 
familiar  with  it.  You  will  find  there  a  great  many 
examples  of  English  oratory,  too.  Compare  the 
speeches  made  in  Parliament  with  the  speeches 


AMEKICAN  LITERATURE  127 

made  in  Congress.  You  will  find  a  difference,  of 
course  ;  but  as  you  read  on,  you  can  hardly  escape 
a  growing  doubt  as  to  whether  this  difference  is 
essential,  a  difference  of  kind.  If  you  were  late 
ly  vexed  by  a  perhaps  unsympathetic  summary 
of  American  eloquence,  you  may  be  consoled  by 
observing  how  much  of  it  might  be  applied  to 
British  eloquence,  too.  Less  hampered  by  the 
pressure  of  material  facts,  less  restrained  by  the 
presence  of  keen  critics,  our  orators  perhaps 
soar  higher  and  certainly  circle  more  widely 
than  the  orators  of  England.  At  heart,  though, 
one  must  feel,  they  are  as  closely  akin  as  they 
are  in  language.  If  our  political  literature  has 
added  anything  to  the  political  literature  of 
England,  we  can  hardly  assert  that  it  has  added 
more  thaiya  demonstration  of  what  that  literature 
might  have  been  in  England  itself,  if  in  England 
the  constant  pressure  of  external  fact  had  been 
awhile  relaxed. 


SUCH  relaxation  of  the  pressure  of  external  fact 
as  has  seemed  to  underlie  our  political  thought 
seems  more  clearly  still  to  underlie  the  religious 
and  the  philosophical  thought  of  the  period  we 
are  now  considering.  The  profound  truth  most 
emphasized  by  the  Calvinistic  creed  of  the  emi 
grant  fathers  was  the  inherent  vileness  of  human 
nature.  Men  were  born  bad,  it  held,  so  bad  that 


128  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

nothing  they  themselves  could  do  might  ever  be 
enough  to  save  them  from  deserved  damnation. 
A  few  generations  of  native  American  experience 
led  Americans  seriously  to  question  this  view  of 
human  nature,  and  in  the  end  to  substitute  for 
it  one  diametrically  opposite.  In  the  pure  rec 
ords  of  New  England  Unitarianisin,  in  the  unfet 
tered  philosophy  of  Emerson,  in  the  half -inspired 
preaching  of  the  late  Bishop  of  Massachusetts, 
one  cannot  help  feeling  a  sublime  confidence  in 
the  divine  possibilities  that  lie  hidden  in  even  the 
vilest  human  being. 

If  we  could  only  induce  ourselves  honestly  to 
share  this  confidence,  we  might  be  swept  with 
these  enthusiasts  to  ecstatic  heights.  These  men 
themselves  were  good  men — wonderfully  good. 
They  were  sympathetic  men,  permeated  with  an 
honest  sense  of  human  fraternity.  Let  us  be  our 
best,  they  seem  to  say,  and  all  shall  be  well ;  and 
by  and  by  there  shall  be  an  end  of  evil.  What 
is  more, — what  strengthened  their  faith  and  still 
strengthens  their  authority, — this  noble  optimism 
of  theirs  was  nearer  to  the  truth  of  human  nature 
about  them,  for  all  its  growing  vileness,  than  was 
the  grim  pessimism  of  the  Calvinist  fathers  to  the 
human  facts  of  the  New  World  where  a  whole 
continent  lay  open  to  whoever  had  courage  to 
penetrate  its  wilderness.  It  is  only  where  life 
is  dense  that  the  struggle  for  existence  grows 
fierce.  It  is  only  in  a  crowded  world  that  we 


AMEKICAN  LITEBATUEE  129 

have  forced  upon  us,  in  all  their  horror,  the  last 
ing  realities  of  sin  and  evil.  In  a  world  where 
there  is  still  room,  whoever  will  may  stand  aside, 
dreaming  himself  like  to  a  god ;  and  whoever  can 
put  faith  in  such  dreams  grows  godlike  dream 
ing,  and  is  a  very  beautiful  fact  to  contemplate. 
Without  the  dreamers  the  world  would  be  poor 
er  :  we  may  all  grant  that.  There  are  moods — 
and  not  our  least  precious  ones — in  which,  for  all 
our  knowledge,  the  dreamers  seem  the  prophets, 
revealing  the  things  which  are  to  be. 

In  the  social  history  of  New  England  there  is  a 
petty  fact  which  in  moods  like  this  confronts  us. 
It  is  not  unique ;  none  is  more  commonplace, 
none  could  have  been  more  confidently  pre 
dicted.  Like  its  innumerable  fellows  in  human 
experience,  though,  it  has  a  significance  which  at 
moments  when  we  feel  like  yielding  to  the  ec 
stasies  of  optimistic  enthusiasm  is  almost  tragic. 
You  must  already  recognize/that  generally  comic 
experiment  at  Brook  Farm,  where  a  company  of 
enthusiasts  tried  to  combine  plain  living,  high 
thinking,  and  the  earning  of  a  decent  livelihood. 
We  all  know  the  result.  They  did  not  earn  a 
decent  livelihood ;  they  squabbled,  in  spite  of 
the  highest  intellectual  and  moral  intentions ;  and 
what  few  were  not  dispersed  by  this  state  of  affairs 
found  plain  living  by  itself  not  so  intrinsically 
attractive  as  to  prevent  them  from  reverting  each 
to  the  most  comfortable  circumstances  he  could 
9 


130  AMEKICAN  LITERATUEE 

command.  Calvinistic  depravity  in  this  little  cir 
cle  took  no  very  acute  form  ;  it  was  enough,  how 
ever,  to  prevent  successful  co-operative  aspira 
tion  to  higher  things  than  every- day  life  affords. 
Brook  Farm,  in  short,  typifies  what  in  all  likeli 
hood  must  always  happen  to  American  optimists 
who  try  to  test  their  optimism  experimentally. 
Dreams  are  very  noble  things ;  but  to  dream  we 
must  sleep  ;  and  to  get  along  in  this  actual  world 
of  ours  we  must  be  wide  awake. 

Our  business  with  these  dreams,  however,  is 
not  to  share  them  for  the  moment,  nor  yet  to  sigh 
over  their  evanescence.  It  is  to  ask  ourselves 
whether  they  have  added  to  the  dreams  of  Eng 
land  anything  which  makes  richer  the  lasting  ex 
pression  in  English  words  of  the  meaning  of  life. 
They  have  doubtless  added  something.  What  this 
something  is  one  finds  it  hard  to  say ;  yet  at  heart 
one  can  hardly  help  feeling  sure  that  the  records 
of  human  purity  would  be  poorer  without  the  rec 
ords  which  the  New  England  dreamers  have  left 
us.  Perhaps,  as  we  scrutinize  these  dreams,  their 
chief  trait  seems  to  be  that  they  are  always  unfet 
tered  yet  never  base.  Left  to  itself,  the  devout 
free  thought  of  New  England  has  such  freedom 
from  vileness  as  we  love  to  call  childlike.  The 
dreamers  of  Old  England  have  been  perhaps 
more  sophisticated,  at  all  events  more  conscious 
of  how  their  dreams  must  diverge  from  reality. 
In  England,  we  remember,  real  fact  has  hardly 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  131 

relaxed  its  pressure  since  English  literature  be 
gan.  In  America,  as  we  have  seen,  the  case  has 
hitherto  been  different.  So  we  find  ourselves 
where  we  found  ourselves  a  little  while  ago,  when 
we  were  thumbing  anew  the  leaves  of  our  old 
standard  speakers.  The  philosophic  dreamers 
of  America,  we  must  admit,  have  added  to  Eng 
lish  literature  little  that  might  not  have  been 
added  in  England  itself,  if  in  England  the  press 
ure  of  external  fact  had  been  awhile  relaxed. 


XI 


So  far  we  have  considered  these  political  and 
philosophic  moods  only  as  they  revealed  them 
selves  in  mere  words.  We  have  neglected  per 
haps  their  chief  manifestation,  when  for  once 
they  revealed  themselves  in  triumphant  action. 
In  this  case  they  not  only  expressed  themselves  ; 
they  actually  altered  the  course  of  human  history. 
A  fiery  fusion  of  these  moods,  which  we  have 
considered  apart,  was  what  produced  that  groat 
outburst  of  human  sympathy  which  resulted  in  the 
abolition  of  African  slavery.  The  forces  which 
brought  about  this  great  result  gathered  them 
selves,  to  no  small  degree,  in  literary  form.  AVe 
all  know  "  Uncle  Tom's  Cabin  ;  "  we  all  know  the 
work  of  Whittier  and  of  Lowell ;  we  all  know  the 
passionate  intensity  of  Garrison,  the  magnificent, 
scurrilous  eloquence  of  Phillips.  Here,  we  may 


132  AMEEICAN  LITERATURE 

think,  is  surely  something  peculiarly  our  own 
— native  American  enthusiasm  dealing  with  stern 
reality,  and  practically  asserting  the  eternal  truth 
of  humane  American  optimism.  There  is  no  re 
laxed  sense  of  fact  here. 

To  question  this  conclusion  seems  nowadays 
almost  disloyal.  Whatever  our  personal  sympa 
thies,  no  one  can  deny  the  nobly  humane  impulse 
which  underlay  even  the  vagaries  of  Abolition. 
Nor  can  any  one  deny  that  what  only  sixty  years 
ago  was  ridiculed  as  humanitarian  fanaticism  has 
taken  its  place  to-day  among  the  most  honoured 
traditions  of  the  American  people.  Abolition 
ended  what  every  one  now  admits  to  have  been 
the  monstrous  evil  of  negro  slavery.  For  that  it 
:  deserves  all  honour. 

Were  this  the  whole  story,  many  of  us  would 
to-day  feel  more  happily  secure  than  we  honest 
ly  can.  To  many  who  pause  to  think,  tradition 
seems  in  this  case,  as  in  innumerable  others,  to 
be  blinding  the  eyes  of  the  people  to  stern,  un 
welcome  fact.  It  is  hiding  the  truth  that,  in  the 
great  days  of  Abolition  as  well  as  now  and  for 
ever,  enthusiasm  lacks  foresight.  It  is  hiding 
the  truth  that  for  all  their  noble  enthusiasm,  the 
Abolitionists,  after  the  good  old  British  fashion, 
directed  their  reforming  energies  not  against  the 
evils  prevalenljXn  the  actual  society  of  which  they 
formed  a  part ;  but  against  those  that  prevailed 
in  a  rival  society  which  they  knew  chiefly  by 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  133 


They  found  this  society — and  with  it 
our  whole  country — cursed  with  the  evil  of  slav 
ery.  They  left  us  all  burdened  with  another  evil, 
which  at  times  seems  almost  as  monstrous,  al 
most  as  untrue  to  the  real  facts  of  human  experi 
ence.  What  has  supplanted  negro  slavery  is  not 
mere  freedom;  it  is  that  appalling  degradation 
/  of  American  citizenship  which  the  Abolitionists 
hailed  so  eagerly  under  the  name  of  negro  suf 
frage. 

In  this  aspect  we  cannot  so  confidently  assert 
that  the  great  movement  of  Abolition  was  actu 
ated  by  a  very  stern  sense  of  fact.  A  'moment 
ago,  too,  we  had  a  glimpse  of  another  aspect  in 
which  (we  may  question  whether,  after  all,  Aboli 
tion  was  so  distinctively  American  as  we  like  to 
think.  In  this  aspect,  by  no  means  its  least  ob 
vious,  it  becomes  only  one  among  the  many  symp 
toms  that  prove  us  still  of  English  race.  At  least 
in  their  modern  history,  we  must  remember,  the 
English  have  displayed  inexhaustible  power, 
when  impelled  by  moral  motives,  of  meddling 
with  the  business  of  other  people  whose  affairs 
they  imperfectly  understand.  We  find  ourselves, 
in  short,  where  we  found  ourselves  before.  Like 
the  purely  political  and  the  purely  philosophical 
literature  that  surrounds  it,  the  literature  of  Abo 
lition  can  hardiyle  asserted  to  add  much  to  the 
lasting  expression  of  the  meaning  of  life  other 
wise  embodied  in  English  words. 


134  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

XII 

^ 

WE  have  dealt  now  with  those  kinds  of  liter 
ature  whose  office  is  chiefly  to  affect  human 
conduct.  We  must  turn  to  those  kinds  whose 
office  is  chiefly  to  instruct  or  to  delight — to  the 
literature,  in  short,  that  we  had  in  mind  when  at 
the  beginning  of  this  discussion  we  first  thought 
of  the  six  worthies  of  New  England.  With  this 
we  shall  have  to  deal  even  more  summarily  than 
with  what  we  have  considered  before.  We  may 
justify  ourselves  by  the  thought  that  while  the 
literature  we  have  touched  on  is  perhaps  known 
chiefly  to  students,  the  literature  now  before  us 
is  the  literature  still  most  familiar  to  the  Amer 
ican  people — the  literature,  in  short,  that  is  sure  to 
be  found  in  any  native  library,  public  or  private. 

A  few  words,  then,  of  our  historians ;  after 
that,  of  our  purely  literary  figures ;  and  we  shall 
have  done. 

XIII 

BOSTON  has  been  the  home  of  historians  who 
may  fairly  be  treated  with  high  respect.  One 
need  not  name  them  all,  nor  need  one  specifi 
cally  say  that  the  school  for  which  they  stand  is 
not  confined  to  Boston.  Once  for  all,  one  may 
affirm  that  Prescott,  and  Motley,  and  the  rest,  are 
writers  of  real  industry  and  real  power.  Accord 
ing  to  the  methods  of  their  time— a  time  that 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE  135 

preceded  the  microscopic  accuracy  of  the  schol 
arship  now  most  in  vogue — they  collected  their 
material  with  diligence  and  care  ;  and  according 
to  the  pleasantly  polite  fashion  then  still  prevalent 
they  expressed  the  results  of  this  labour  in  a  style 
that,  despite  occasional  formality,  is  permanently 
pleasant  to  read.  What  they  did,  they  did  well. 
They  have  given  us  books  that  should  lastingly 
hold  places  in  the  long  list  of  historical  literature 
that  dignifies  English  prose.  So  much  every 
one  must  admit;  and  it  would  be  a  pleasure  to 
dwell  long  on  this  honourable  achievement. 

Our  business  with  these  men,  however,  is 
only  to  inquire  whether  they  have  added  to  Eng 
lish  literature  anything  essentially  different,  in 
thought  or  in  phrase,  from  what  that  literature 
would  otherwise  comprise ;  in  other  words, 
whether  they  have  done  work  that  permanently 
enhances  our  conception  of  what  historical  lit 
erature  may  be.  By  itself  their  work  is  surely 
admirable  ;  but  we  cannot  consider  it  only  by 
itself.  It  must  take  its  place  in  a  literature 
which,  to  go  no  further,  comprises  without  it  the 
work  of  Gibbon,  of  Hume,  of  Macaulay,  of  Carlyle. 
These  names  are  enough.  Admire  our  own  his 
torians  as  we  may,  we  can  claim  for  them  no 
higher  merit  than  that  of  having  added  their 
romantic  tales  to  the  already  rich  store  of  ro 
mantic  narrative  which  without  them  our  lan 
guage  possesses. 


136  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

XIV 

THE  word  romantic  is  not  very  precise.  Among 
a  dozen  meanings,  however,  it  suggests  chiefly, 
perhaps,  a  fondness  for  contemplating  things  not 
as  they  are  in  our  actual  life,  but  rather  as  they 
might  have  been  in  a  dreamy  past,  or  as  they 
might  be  in  some  far-off  present  or  fantastic 
future.  No  phase  of  romantic  feeling  is  more 
constant  than  that  which  delights  in  traditions  of 
things  remote  in  time  or  in  space — if  so  may  be 
in  both.  These  we  may  dream  of  as  better,  more 
beautiful,  more  stirring  than  the  trivialities  we 
know  about  us.  We  all  know  this  spirit  in  the 
curious  petty  form  which  makes  native  Yankees 
such  minute  genealogists  ;  in  that  more  serious 
form,  too,  which  makes  foreign  missions  so  much 
more  popular  than  domestic.  It  was  a  phase  of 
this  spirit,  delighting  to  revive  the  grandeurs  of  a 
vanished  time,  that  impelled  Irving,  and  Ticknor, 
and  Prescott,  and  Motley  to  live  so  much  of  their 
inner  lives  rather  among  the  splendours  of  Renas 
cent  Spain  than  among  the  respectable  democ 
racy  of  the  United  States. 

In  this  aspect  the  American  historians  resem 
ble  the  other  American  writers  whose  literary 
purpose  has  been  more  purely  artistic.  The 
dominant  note  in  the  work  of  almost  all  of  these 
may  be  called  romantic.  It  was  a  phase  of  the 
romantic  spirit  that  impelled  Irving  again,  and 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE  137 

Longfellow,  and  Lowell,  and  at  times  even  Whit- 
tier,  to  saturate  themselves  in  the  delights  of 
great  European  literature  ;  and  to  phrase  this  ex 
perience  in  terms  that,  however  modern  fashion 
may  sometimes  slight  them,  have  made  romantic 
dreams  the  lasting  possession  of  American  youth. 
To  no  European,  indeed,  can  Europe,  with  its 
limitless  past,  be  quite  so  stirring  as  to  a  native 
of  this  New  World,  in  whom  a  starved  romantic 
spirit  is  lurking  j/and  nothing  has  more  helped 
us  to  this  keenest,  purest  kind  of  pleasure  than 
our  romantic  historians,  and  poets,  and  novelists. 
WThoever  does  not  love  and  enjoy  them  must  be 
inappreciative  or  ungrateful. 

They  have  done  us,  then,  a  great  service — a 
service  on  which  it  would  be  pleasant  to  dwell 
long.  Here,  however,  Ave  have  no  time  for  eulogy. 
The  question  before  us  is  simply  whether  they 
have  made  English  literature  more  widely,  last 
ingly  expressive  than  it  would  have  been  with 
out  them.  In  all  frankness  wre  can  hardly  as 
sert  that  on  the  whole  they  have.  Without  them 
English  literature  possesses  records  enough  and 
to  spare  that  show  what  the  romantic  spirit  is. 
These  records,  as  well  as  our  own,  must  be  in 
mind  whenever  we  attempt,  as  wo  attempted  a 
moment  ago,  to  define  this  spirit.  The  defini 
tion  was  unhappily  crude  and  vague.  It  was 
enough,  though,  to  fix  one  fact :  in  essence  the 
romantic  spirit  is  dreamy,  and  like  a  true  dream 


138  AMEKIOAN   LITERATURE 

flourishes  best  when  the  pressure  of  external  fact 

k     is  deliberately  or  accidentally  relaxed.     The  dif 

ference  between  our  romantic  literature  and  the 

romantic  literature  of  Europe  is  not  great  ;  it  lies 

chiefly,  perhaps,  in  the  fact  that,  with  perceptibly 

less  intensity  and  power,  ours  is  less  conscious, 

</     more  spontaneous.     As  wo  consider  our  romantic 

writers  coolly,   in  short,    they  generally  reveal 

themselves  just   as  English-speaking  men,   hap 

pily  resident  in  a  world  where  troublesome  fact 

y       presses  more  lightly  than  in  England. 

<          l 


AMONG  them,  however,  there  are  two,  very  un 
like  each  other,  who  are  similar  in  being  dis 
tinctly  different  from  any  writers  whom  we  can 
feel  to  be  characteristically  English.  These  are 
Poo  and  Hawthorne. 

Poe,  to  be  sure,  is  fantastic  and  meretricious 
throughout.  In  his  work  as  in  his  life  he  was 

1    haunted  by  the  vices  and  the  falsity  of  the  stage 
I  —  .  . 

that  bred  him  ;j  but  he  was  really  haunted.  As 
one  knows  him  better,  one  does  not  love  him 
more.  In  another  way,  though,  one  grows  to 
care  for  him,  or  at  least  to  pity  him.  For  with  all 
his  falsity,  with  all  his  impudence  and  sham,  the 
man  is  a  man  by  himself.  There  is  something 
freakish,  not  quite  earthly,  wholly  his  own  in  the 
fancies  and  the  cadences  that  grow  wild  amid  his 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE  139 

work.  If  it  bo  something  to  have  added  a  new 
note  to  literature,  then  we  Americans  must  re 
spect  the  memory  of  Poe. 

With  Hawthorne,    the  case    is  very   different. 
To    men  of  our  time,   beyond   doubt,  his  work 
seems   generally  not   fantastic   but   imaginative, 
and  surely  not  meretricious  but  in  its  own  way 
beautiful.     Nor  is  this  the  whole  stoiy  :  almost  " 
alone  among  our  writers,  we  may  say,  Hawthorne 
has  a  lasting  native  significance.     For  this  there 
are  surely  two  good  reasons.     In  the  first  place, 
he  is  almost  the  solitary  American  artist  who  has 
phrased  his  meaning  in  words  of  which  the  beauty 
seems  sure  to  grow  with  the  years.     In  the  sec 
ond  place,  what  marks  him  as  most  impregnably 
American   is  this  :    when  we    look  close  to   see 
what  his  meaning  really  was,  we  find  it  a  thing 
that  in  the  old  days,  at  last  finally  dead  and  gone, 
had  been  the   great  motive  power  of  his  race. 
What  Hawthorne   really  voices  is  thatf  strange,  v 
morbid,  haunting  sense  of  other  things  that  we 
see  or  hear,  which  underlay  the  intense  idealism 
•  of  the  emigrant  Puritans,  and  which  remains  per 
haps  the  most  inalienable  emotional  heritage  of 
their  children.     It  is  Hawthorne,  in  brief,  who 
finally  phrases  the  meaning  of  such  a  life  as  The- 
ophilus  Eaton  lived  and  Cotton  Mather  recorded. 
Hawthorne  and  Poe,  then,  have  added   some- 
thing,  in  both  thought  and  phrase,  to  the  litera 
ture  of  England.     Yet   when  we  ask   ourselves 


140  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

coolly  just  what  this  something  is,  we  need  not 
be  surprised  to  find  no  very  new  answer.  In  the 
half-mad  vagaries  of  the  one,  and  in  the  melan 
choly  musings  of  the  other,  we  can  feel,  to  be 
sure,  at  least  emotions  that  we  should  have  far 
to  seek  elsewhere.  In  the  very  extravagance  of 
their  freedom,  however,  these  emotions  bring  us 
back  to  where  we  have  so  often  found  ourselves 
before.  They  are  surely  such  as  we  should  ex 
pect  dreamy,  imaginative,  English-speaking  folks 
to  know,  when  their  lot  is  cast  in  a  still  un- 
crowded  world.  For  all  this,  though,  Poe  and 
Hawthorne  are  in  no  wise  Englishmen.  What 
ever  they  express,  it  is  surely  something  of  their 
own,  and  so  of  ours. 

XVI 

SOMETHING  of  our  own,  too,  is  expressed  by  the 
kind  of  literature  that  foreigners  are  apt  to  think 
most  characteristically  American.  This  is  the 
sort  of  thing  that  is  called  American  humour.  In 
trivial  forms  it  pervades  the  newspapers.  Its 
vulgar  heroes  are  Artemas  Ward  and  Josh  Bill 
ings.  Its  masterpieces  are  probably  to  be  found 
in  Irving's  "Knickerbocker,"  and  in  the  works 
of  Lowell,  and  of  the  last  survivor  of  the  best 
days  of  New  England  letters — Dr.  Holmes. 

One  can  hardly  define  American  humour,  but 
we  all  know  what  it  is.  It  is  based  on  shrewd, 
cool,  good-tempered  common-sense  ;  it  has  serene 


AMERICAN  LITERATURE  141 

assurance,  it  has  great  freshness  of  feeling.  One 
likes  it,  one  laughs  at  it,  and  above  all  one  feels 
it  generally  spontaneous  and  wholesome.  It 
leaves  no  bitterness  behind.  Somehow,  though, 
it  is  not  profound  humour,  not  great ;  it  is  apt  to 
have  less  serious  relation  to  life  than  at  first 
glance  seems  the  case.  "With  all  its  fresh  charm, 
all  its  wholesome  humanity,  its  final  trait  seems, 
broadly  speaking,  to  be  good-natured,  reckless 
extravagance  of  both  thought  and  phrase.  This 
extravagance,  if  it  be  really  the  chief  trait  of  our 
humour,  marks  even  this  most  characteristic 
phase  of  our  national  literature  as  expressing 
only  another  aspect  of  the  same  experience  that 
we  have  found  so  generally  to  underlie  what  we, 
as  a  people,  have  thought,  and  felt,  and  said. 
At  bottom,  after  all,  extravagance  is  only  another 
name  for  cheerful  neglect  of  stern  reality.  It  is 
another  and  a  brighter  expression  of  what  men 
know  and  feel  when  external  fact  does  not  press 
them  too  hard. 

XVII 

So  much  for  the  American  literature  of  the 
past.  This  is  not  the  place  to  deal  with  the 
present  or  the  future.  In  the  period  we  have  con 
sidered,  almost  every  writer  has  been  concerned 
either  with  what  had  gone  before  him  or  with 
what  was  passing  about  him.  Almost  all,  in 
short,  have  expressed  what  we  have  seen  to  be 


142  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

the  historical  experience  of  American  life — the 
manner  of  the  free  growth  of  an  English  people 
in  a  world  where  there  was  still  plenty  of  room. 

In  this  same  period,  however,  there  is  a  single 
figure  who  seems  steadily  and  constantly  to  face 
not  what  is  now  past,  but  what  is  now  present  or 
to  come.  Though  his  right  to  respect  is  ques 
tioned  oftenest  of  all,  we  cannot  fairly  pass  Walt 
Whitman  without  mention.  He  lacks,  of  course, 
to  a  grotesque  degree,  artistic  form  ;  but  that 
very  lack  is  characteristic.  Artistic  form,  as  we 
have  seen,  is  often  the  final  stamp  that  marks 
human  expression  as  a  thing  of  the  past.  Whit 
man  remarkably  illustrates  this  principle :  he 
lacks  form  chiefly  because  he  is  stammeringly 
overpowered  by  his  bewildering  vision  of  what  he 
believes  to  be  the  future.  He  is  uncouth,  inar 
ticulate,  whatever  you  please  that  is  least  ortho 
dox  ;  yet,  after  all,  he  can  make  you  feel  for  the 
moment  how  even  the  ferry -boats  plying  from 
New  York  to  Brooklyn  are  fragments  of  God's 
eternities.  Those  of  us  who  love  the  past  are 
far  from  sharing  his  confidence  in  the  future. 
Surely,  however,  that  is  no  reason  for  denying 
the  miracle  that  he  has  wrought  by  idealizing  the 
East  River.  The  man  who  has  done  this  is  the 
only  one  who  points  out  the  stuff  of  which  per 
haps  the  new  American  literature  of  the  future 
may  in  time  be  made,  who  foreruns  perhaps  a 
spirit  that  may  inspire  that  literature,  if  it  grow 


AMEKICAN  LITEEATUKE  143 

at  last  into  an  organic  form  of  its  own,  with  a 
meaning  not  to  be  sought  in  other  worlds  than 
this  western  world  of  ours. 

XVIII 

BRIEF  and  hasty  as  this  sketch  has  had  to  be, 
few  as  are  the  aspects  of  our  life  and  our  letters 
on  which  we  have  had  time  to  touch,  it  has  per 
haps  been  enough  to  indicate  what  some  of  us 
have  meant  when  in  careless  phrase  we  have  some 
times  said  that  America  has  no  literature  at  all. 
What  we  really  mean  is  only  that  while  Ameri-  I 
cans  have  added  something  to  the  lasting  expres 
sions  of  the  meaning  of  life  that  are  phrased  in 
English  words,  they  are  still  far  from  having 
added  enough  to  justify  a  valid  claim  to  an  inde 
pendent  place  among  those  peoples  whose  na 
tional  literatures  are  inevitably  lasting  posses 
sions  of  humanity.  New  England,  in  its  o\\n 
little  way,  has  voiced  the  experience  of  English 
humanity  free  for  awhile  from  the  stern  pressure 
of  external  fact.  That  is  almost  all. 

Nor  can  I  feel  that  we  have  erred,  while  con> 
sidering  American  literature,  in  attending  chiefly 
to  that  New  England  which  to  me  is  the  spot  on 
earth  where  life  means  most.  In  America,  I 
believe,  only  New  England  has  expressed  itself 
in  a  literary  form  which  inevitably  commands 
attention  from  whoever  pursues  such  inquiries 


144  AMERICAN  LITERATURE 

as  ours.  What  else  has  been  written  in  the  pe 
riods  of  American  life  that  we  have  consid 
ered  may  almost  certainly  be  brought  within 
generalizations  based  on  the  literature  of  New 
England.  In  this  fact  a  New  Englander  feels 
a  pride  deeper  than  I  realized  when  I  began  to 
write  these  lines ;  yet  he  feels,  too,  a  sadness. 
By  the  inexorable  law  on  which  we  have  touched 
more  than  once,  the  very  fact  that  New  England 
has  actually  expressed  its  unfettered  experience 
seems  to  mean  that  the  unfettered  experience  of 
New  England,  and  all  the  New  England  that  we 
have  known  and  cared  for,  is  past  or  passing. 

Yet  after  all,  much  as  we  may  love  it,  even  that 
unfettered  New  England  is  not  the  ultimate  fact 
of  human  history.  It  is  hard  to  avoid  the  con 
viction  that  this  very  New  England  we  love  so 
well  has  youthfully  overestimated  herself  and  her 
work.  In  endeavouring  not  unduly  to  praise  this 
work,  then,  many  of  us  perhaps  err  the  other 
way.  So  far  as  it  goes,  this  work  is  sound  and 
wholesome.  What  the  six  worthies  with  whose 
names  we  began  this  discussion  have  contributed 
to  lasting  literature  is  no  great  thing,  to  b6  sure ; 
but  it  is  something.  Something  better  still  is 
the  great  purity  of  their  lives.  Emasculate  we 
'  may  call  them  in  certain  moods.  In  other  moods, 
and  better,  their  lives  tell  us  that  if  restraint  be 
relaxed  what  will  flourish  most  in  English  human 
nature  is  not  the  evil ;  and  whatever  else,  great 


AMERICAN   LITERATURE  145 

or  little,  their  works  tell  us,  they  tell  us  nothing 
sordid,  base,  impure.  As  the  struggling  years 
of  the  future  come  upon  us,  we  shall  value  this 
purity  more  and  more.  In  the  past  many  of  us 
have  looked  at  these  men  with  irreverent  impa 
tience.  What  have  they  done,  after  all,  we  have 
asked,  that  we  should  so  trouble  ourselves  about 
them.  But  now,  as  the  years  are  passing,  we  ask 
ourselves  such  questions  less  and  less.  Rather 
we  look  at  these  men  with  growing  love  and 
veneration.  For  the  little  group  is  a  group  that 
we  should  have  far  to  seek  elsewhere.  Of  each 
one  may  be  said  the  truest  and  the  loveliest  thing 
that  has  been  said  of  Longfellow— and  no  man 
could  wish  a  worthier  epitaph  : 

44  He  left  his  native  air  the  sweeter  for  his  song." 
10 


VI 
JOHN  GEEENLEAF  WHITTIEE 


(A  Memoir  presented  to  the  American  Academy  of  Arts 
and  Sciences,  on  June  14,  1893.) 


JOHN  GEEENLEAF  WHITTIEE 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER  was  born  in  Haver- 
hill,  Massachusetts,  on  December  17,  1807.*  His 
ancestors,  in  every  line  of  the  soundest  Yankee 
stock,  had  resided  from  the  earliest  times  in  Es 
sex  County,  or  in  the  older  regions  of  New  Hamp 
shire.  The  house  in  which  he  was  born  had  been 
built  by  his  emigrant  ancestor,  Thomas  Whittier, 
who  died  at  the  age  of  seventy-six,  in  1696,  after 
above  fifty  years'  residence  in  New  England.  In 
1694,  Joseph  Whittier,  son  of  the  emigrant,  and 
great-grandfather  of  the  poet,  had  married  the 
daughter  of  a  well-known  Quaker.  Probably 
from  this  time  the  immediate  family  of  the  poet 
had  belonged  to  the  Eeligious  Society  of  Friends. 
In  all  other  respects  their  condition  had  been 
that  of  substantial  New  England  farmers. 

Amid  the  extreme  diversity  of  religious  views 
that  marks  our  own  time,  and  the  efforts  now  so 
general  among  the  New  England  clergy  to  em 
phasize  the  few  things  that  religious  people  be- 

*For  the  facts  of  Whittier's  life  I  rely  chiefly  on  the 
biography  by  Mr.  F.  H.  Underwood. 


150      JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER 

lieve  in  common,  and  to  neglect  the  many  con 
cerning  which  they  radically  differ,  we  are  apt  to 
think  of  religious  divergences  as  verbal  or  for 
mal.  In  general  we  are  probably  right.  Modern 
Yankees,  at  all  events,  are  not  profound  theolo 
gians.  They  are  disposed  either  to  take  religion 
as  they  find  it,  or  else  without  much  ado  to  se 
lect  in  place  of  their  ancestral  faith  some  creed 
or  form  of  worship  which  they  find  socially  or 
aesthetically  more  congenial.  Sectarian  differ 
ences  nowadays  certainly  do  not  display  them 
selves  in  obvious  differences  of  character.  With 
people  of  ordinary  parts,  of  course,  this  has  gen 
erally  been  the  case  at  all  times  ;  with  really 
serious  natures  the  case  is  different.  The  few 
people  in  any  generation  who  seem  instinctively 
aware  of  the  tremendous  seriousness  of  religion — 
the  people  whose  presence  in  this  world  was  per 
haps  the  chief  basis  of  the  Calvinistic  doctrine 
of  election— are  inevitably  affected,  often  perma- 
mently,  by  the  religious  doctrine  that  surrounds 
their  early  years.  Whatever  else  Whittier  was, 
he  was  a  profoundly  religious  man,  who  could  not 
help  taking  life  in  earnest.  To  understand  him 
at  all,  then,  we  must  know  something  of  the 
peculiar  religious  views  which  he  never  relin 
quished. 


JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER      151 

II 

THE  Friends  in  New  England,  writes  a  gentle 
man  who  is  now  an  earnest  member  of  the  Relig 
ious  Society  in  question, 

"were  Orthodox  in  that  they  believed  in  God  as  Father, 
Son,  and  Holy  Spirit,  in  Christ  as  truly  one  with  the 
Father,  yet  also  very  man,  and  in  the  efficacy  of  His 
atonement  for  the  forgiveness  of  sins.  But  the  term  *  Or 
thodox  '  in  New  England  is  usually  taken  to  mean  the 
tenets  of  the  Westminster  Confession.  Whittier  was 
trained  to  regard  the  extreme  views  of  this  Confession 
with  aversion.  He  drank  in  the  truth  of  the  universal 
love  of  God  to  all  men  in  Christian,  Jewish,  or  Pagan 
lands,  that  God  so  loved  the  world  that  He  sent  His  Son, 
that  Christ  died  for  all  men,  and  His  atonement  availed 
for  all  who  in  every  land  accepted  the  light  with  which  He 
enlightened  their  minds  and  consciences,  and  who  listen 
ing  to  His  still  small  voice  in  the  soul  turned  in  any  true 
sense  toward  God,  away  from  evil  and  to  the  right  and 
loving.  Whittier  thus  drank  in  a  spirit  of  universal  love, 
a  sense  of  oneness  with  all  men,  that  fitted  him  to  espouse 
and  advocate  the  cause  of  the  ignorant,  the  weak,  the  out 
cast — the  slave,  the  Indian,  the  heathen.  It  gave  him  sym 
pathy  with  all  loving,  saintly  souls  like  Fe'nelon,  Guion, 
and  other  Roman  Catholics  of  like  spirit,  and  nerved 
his  manly,  indignant  scorn  of  hard  and  cruel  men  that 
professed  the  name  of  l  Christian.'  Whittier  was  trained 
to  have  a  great  reverence  for  the  Bible.  ...  He  had 
read  much  in  the  Journals  of  Friends.  He  had  steeped 
Ids  mind  with  their  thoughts  and  loved  them  because  they 
were  so  saintly  and  yet  so  humbly  unconscious  of  it. 

"  The  title  '  Quaker  Poet '  is  a  true  one,  not  simply  be- 


152      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIEB 

cause  he  was  a  Friend  by  membership,  but  because  he 
was  permeated  by  the  spirit  of  Quaker  Christianity.  It 
is  true  that  Whittier  was  much  broadened  by  association 
with  men  like  Emerson,  Longfellow,  and  others,  Garrison 
especially ;  but  he  was  to  the  end  a  Friend  in  his  religion." 

The  letter  from  which  these  passages  are  quoted 
was  addressed  to  a  kinswoman  of  Whittier's, 
who  has  kindly  sent  me  some  notes  of  her  own 
recollections  of  Friends.  Though  some  years 
younger  than  he,  she  was  trained  under  similar 
influences.  Her  recollections,  then,  we  may  guess 
in  some  degree  to  have  blended  with  his. 

t 

"During  the  early  part  of  this  century,"  she  writes, 
"  I  think  the  Society  of  Friends  throughout  the  rural  dis 
tricts  of  New  England  retained  in  a  great  measure  the 
stern,  rigid  simplicity  and  exclusiveness  which  character 
ized  the  religious  people  of  the  old  Puritan  days.  They  were 
thoroughly  Orthodox,*  and  gave  little  heed  to  the  Unita 
rian  controversy  among  others.  .  .  .  Friends  then  had 
not,  I  think,  all  the  aggressive  fervor  of  the  earlier  days  ; 
there  was  a  degree  of  lukewarmness  ;  but  they  had  among 
them  many  ministers,t  untrained  in  the  learning  of  the 
world,  but  full  of  spiritual  life,  who  laboured  not  only 
among  Friends,  but  wherever  they  felt  themselves  called. 

"  The  Discipline  of  the  Society  was  rigidly  observed  by 
most.  Queries  were  answered  Quarterly,  and  looked  after 
by  appointed  Committee.  I  will  give  some  of  the  Queries, 

*  i.e.,  Trinitarian  Christians,  but  not  Calvinists. 
t  Among  the  Friends  in  general,  men  and  women  may 
alike  be  ministers  ;  but  a  minister  may  receive  no  salary. 


UNIVERSITY 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      153 

as  they  undoubtedly  exerted    some    influence    over  the 
children,  who  often  listened  to  them  : 

"Are  meetings  for  worship  duly  attended  ?  hour*  ob 
served  ?  Are  they  preserved  from  sleeping  or  other  un 
becoming  behavior  ? 

"  Are  the  Holy  Scriptures  frequently  read  ? 

"Do  [Friends]  avoid  spirituous  liquors  except  for  Medi 
cine  ? 

"  Do  they  avoid  unnecessary  frequenting  of  taverns  or 
other  places  of  public  resort  ? 

"Are  the  poor  looked  after,  and  assisted  in  such  business 
as  they  are  capable  of  ? 

^  "Are  [Friends]  careful  to  inspect  their  affairs,  punctual 
in  promises  ? 

"  Do  they  live  within  the  bounds  of  their  income  ? 

"Do  they  deal  with  offenders  in  the  Spirit  of  Meekness  ? 
etc.,  etc. 

"  The  children  of  Friends  were  early  taught  that  there 
was  a  still  small  voice  given  them  by  their  Heavenly 
Father  which  could  tell  them  when  they  were  doing 
wrong,  t 

"In  most  cases  they  were  taken  regularly  to  meetings 
for  Worship  —  often  to  those  for  Discipline  —  where  they  had 
to  sit  still  on  hard  benches.  They  had  no  Sabbath-schools, 
but  in  almost  all  families  on  First  Day  afternoon  the  chil 
dren  were  required  to  listen  to  readings  in  the  Holy  Script 
ures  and  they  were  generally  well  informed  in  all  Bible 
History.  When  Whittier  was  a  little  boy  he  once  re 
marked  he  thought  David  could  not  have  been  a  Friend,  as 
he  was  a  man  of  war. 

*  i.  c.  If  no  one  feels  called  to  speak,  do  they  regularly 
wait  for  at  least  one  hour  in  silence  ? 

t  This  doctrine  of  universal  conscience  seems  the  funda 
mental  one  of  the  Society  of  Friends. 


154      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

"Music  and  dancing  were  not  indulged  in.  Novels 
were  forbidden.  But  they  all  the  more  enjoyed  Milton, 
Young,  Cowper,  and  histories  when  obtainable.  It  seems 
"Whittier  had  none  of  these,  at  which  I  marvel,  as  his 
grandmother,  who  lived  with  them,  was  a  Greenleaf,  and 
they  were  literary  people." 

Without  actually  quoting  these  notes,  so  kind 
ly  sent  me,  I  could  hardly  have  reproduced  the 
effect  they  make  on  one  who  carefully  reads  them. 
To  restate  in  one's  own  words  the  earnest  faith 
they  so  tenderly  express  seems  unsympathetic;. 
In  more  worldly  phrase  than  theirs,  however,  what 
Whittier  was  taught  and  believed  seems  to  have 
been  this  :  To  all  human  beings  God  has  given 
an  inner  light,  to  all  He  speaks  with  a  still  small 
voice.  Follow  the  light,  obey  the  voice,  and  all 
will  be  well.  Evil-doers  are  they  who  neglect 
the  light  and  the  voice.  Now  the  light  and  the 
voice  are  God's,  so  to  all  who  will  attend  they 
must  ultimately  show  the  same  truth.  If  the 
voice  call  us  to  correct  others,  then,  or  the  light 
shine  upon  manifest  evil,  it  is  God's  will  that  wo 
smite  error,  if  so  may  be  by  revealing  truth.  If 
those  who  err  be  Friends,  our  duty  bids  us  ex 
postulate  with  them  ;  and  if  they  be  obdurate,  to 
present  them  for  discipline,  which  may  result  in 
their  exclusion  from  our  Religious  Society.  The 
still  small  voice,  it  seems,  really  warns  everybody 
that  certain  lines  of  conduct  are  essentially  wrong 
— among  which  are  the  drinking  of  spirits,  the 


JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIEll      155 

frequenting  of  taverns,  indulgence  in  gaming,  the 
use  of  oaths,  and  the  enslavement  of  any  human 
being. 

Ill 

IN  this  firm  faith,  fortified  from  Scripture,  that 
everybody  really  knows  right  from  wrong,  that 
many  common  lines  of  conduct  are  indubitably 
wrong,  and  that  whoever  follow  such  lines  of 
conduct  do  so  from  wilful  neglect  of  the  inner 
light  and  the  still  small  voice  divinely  vouchsafed 
them,  Whittier  was  trained  and  lived.  To  this 
faith,  involving  the  essential  equality  of  all 
mankind,  and  the  deliberate  ungodliness  of  who 
ever  by  word  or  deed  fails  to  recognize  this 
equality,  may  be  traced  many  of  the  peculiar 
characteristics  which  make  him,  even  to  those  who 
mistrust  the  reforms  in  which  he  so  passionately 
engaged  himself,  perhaps  the  least  irritating  of 
reformers.  Not  only  was  he  trained  from  in 
fancy  in  this  faith,  of  which  reform  is  the  only 
logical  expression  in  action  ;  but  his  life  from 
beginning  to  end  was  singularly  remote  from  that 
heart-breaking  experience  of  actual  fact,  in  crowd 
ed  and  growing  communities,  which  goes  so  far 
nowadays  to  disprove,  for  whoever  will  frankly 
recognize  what  is  before  him,  the  essential  vital 
ity  of  those  parts  of  human  nature  which  are  best. 

A  barefoot  boy  to  look  at,  an  unswerving  be 
liever  at  heart  in  the  inner  light  of  the  Friends, 


156      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

and  by  nature  one  of  those  calmly  passionate 
Yankees  who  cannot  help  taking  life  in  earnest, 
he  grew  np  in  days  when  the  New  England 
country  was  still  pure  in  the  possession  of  an  un 
mixed  race  whose  power  of  self-government  has 
never  been  surpassed.  His  "  Snow-Bound  "  re 
lates  his  own  memories  of  childhood  ;  some  of  the 
sketches  preserved  in  his  prose  works  *  add  pleas 
ant  touches  to  the  better-known  pictures  in  his 
verse.  He  always  had  a  hankering  for  literature. 
A  strolling  Scotch  vagrant,  hospitably  treated  to 
cheese  and  cider,  sang  him  in  payment  some 
songs  of  Burns.  At  fourteen  he  laid  hands  on  a 
copy  of  Burns's  poems.  These  seem  to  have  start 
ed  him  at  writing.  At  seventeen  he  had  written 
a  poem  on  the  ''Exile's  Departure"  from  the 
"  shores  of  Hibernia,"f  which  in  1826  found  its 
way  into  print  in  the  Newburyport  Free  Press, 
then  edited  by  William  Lloyd  Garrison.  From 
1827  to  1892  he  passed  no  year  without  writing 
verses  which  sooner  or  later  came  to  publication. 
In  1826,  before  he  was  nineteen  years  old,  he 
was  visited  while  at  work  in  the  corn-field  by  Gar 
rison,  the  young  editor,  who  had  been  struck  by 
the  merit  of  his  verses.  The  friendship  thus  be- 

*  Notably  "Yankee  Gypsies,"  and  "Magicians  and 
Witch  Folk,  »  Prose  Works,  i.,  326,  309. 

t  Poetical  Works,  iv. ,  333.  This  poem,  like  that  on  the 
' '  Vale  of  the  Menlmac  "  cited  below,  which  belongs  to  the 
same  year,  suggests  the  influence  of  Moore. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF   WHITTIER      157 

gun  proved  life-long.  Had  anything  been  needed 
to  enhance  the  reformatory  instincts  of  a  Yankee 
Quaker,  the  chance  that  this  first  literary  recog 
nition  came  from  the  man  destined  to  be  the  most 
strenuous  reformer  of  his  time  would  have  been 
enough. 

In  his  twentieth  year  Whittier  went  to  the 
Academy  in  Haverhill,  where  he  spent  two  terms, 
and  particularly  distinguished  himself  in  English 
composition.  During  a  winter  vacation  he  taught 
a  country  school.  At  twenty-one  he  was  already 
a  professional  writer  for  some  of  the  smaller 
newspapers.  At  twenty-three  he  was  editor  of 
the  Haverhill  Gazette  ;  and  before  he  was  twenty- 
four  he  was  made  editor  of  the  New  England 
Weekly  Review,  a  paper  published  at  Hartford, 
Connecticut.  At  the  end  of  a  year  and  a  half  he 
resigned  this  office,  on  the  ground  of  ill-health, 
and  returned  to  Massachusetts.  Meanwhile  he 
had  published  a  small  volume  of  "  New  England 
Legends." 

At  this  time  Garrison  had  just  established  the 
Liberator  in  Boston.  The  movement  for  the  abo 
lition  of  slavery  was  fairly  begun.  Into  this 
movement  Whittier  threw  himself  with  all  his 
might.  For  thirty  years  he  constantly  advocated 
it  in  both  prose  and  verse.  He  was  a  member  of 
the  Anti-Slavery  Convention  at  Philadelphia,  in 
1833.*  He  was  attacked  by  a  mob  at  Haverhill  in 

*  See  his  vivid  reminiscences  of  it ;  Prose  Works,  iii. ,  1 71 . 


158      JOHN   GREENLEAF   WHITTIER 

1834  ;  and  by  a  worse  one  at  Concord,  New  Hamp 
shire,  in  1835.  In  this  year  he  was  for  one  term 
a  member  of  the  General  Court  of  Massachusetts. 
In  1837  he  went  to  New  York,  as  a  secretary  of 
the  National  Anti-Slavery  Society.  Early  in  1838 
he  was  made  editor  of  the  Pennsylvania  Freeman, 
a  journal  devoted  to  the  cause  of  abolition,  pub-" 
lished  at  Philadelphia.  In  May,  1838,  the  office 
of  this  paper,  together  with  Pennsylvania  Hall, 
just  erected  for  the  purpose  of  providing  the 
Abolitionists  with  a  regular  place  of  meeting, 
was  burned  by  a  mob.  In  1840  he  resigned  his 
charge  of  the  Freeman,  and  rejoined  his  mother 
and  sister,  who  had  moved  to  Amesbury,  Massa 
chusetts.  Here  henceforth  was  his  legal  resi 
dence. 

From  this  time  on,  his  life  was  remarkably  un 
eventful.  Shy  in  temperament,  and  generally 
troubled  by  that  sort  of  robust  poor  health  which 
frequently  accompanies  total  abstinence,  he  lived 
secluded  in  the  Yankee  country  for  the  better 
part  of  fifty-two  years.  He  wrote  a  great  deal ; 
but  rarely,  it  is  said,  above  half  an  hour  at  a 
time.*  In  1849  a  collection  of  his  poems  was 
published  ;  in  1857  came  another,  this  time  from 
his  final  publishers,  Ticknor  &  Fields.f  He  had 

*  My  authority  for  this  is  a  little  monograph  by  Mrs.  J. 
T.  Fields. 

t  The  firm's  name  has  changed  several  times.  It  is  now 
Houghton,  Mi31in  &,  Company. 


JOHN   GBEENLEAF   WHITTIER      159 

now  become  a  recognized  literary  figure.  He 
was  concerned  in  the  starting  of  the  Atlantic 
Monthly.  The  temper  of  the  North  was  begin 
ning  at  last  to  favour  Abolition.  In  the  civil 
war,  dreadful  as  such  an  event  was  to  his  re 
ligious  convictions,  he  saw  the  hand  of  God  de 
stroying  the  great  evil  of  slavery.  He  had  always 
adhered  to  that  branch  of  the  An ti -slavery  party 
which  believed  in  opposing  the  national  evil  by 
regular  political  means.  He  was  an  ardent  mem 
ber  of  the  Republican  party.  The  close  of  the 
war,  which  found  his  principles  victorious,  found 
him  in  popular  estimation  a  great  man. 

In  1871  he  was  made  a  Fellow  of  the  American 
Academy  of  Arts  and  Sciences.*  It  is  not  remem 
bered  that  he  ever  attended  a  meeting.  General 
society,  even  in  its  severer  forms,  he  never  found 
congenial.  An  occasional  visit  to  intimate  friends 
in  Boston,  and  of  a  summer  to  the  Isles  of  Shoals, 
or  later  to  the  hill  country  about  Chocorua,  were 
the  chief  incidents  in  his  life.  For  all  this  super 
ficial  repose,  however,  he  never  stopped  writing. 
His  "  Birthday  Greeting,"  sent  to  Dr.  Holmes  on 
August  29,  1892,  was  written  only  a  few  weeks 
before  his  death.  He  died,  in  his  eighty-fifth 
year,  at  Hampton  Falls,  New  Hampshire,  on  Sep 
tember  7,  1892. 

*  By  whose  kindness  I  am  permitted  to  reprint  this  me 
moir  from  their  Proceedings. 


1GO      JOHN  GREENLEAF   WHITTIEII 


IV 


DURING  his  last  years  he  made  a  final  collection 
of  his  writings,  with  a  few  brief  notes.*  It  is  in 
seven  volumes,  four  of  verse  and  three  of  prose. 
The  arrangement  is  a  little  confusing.  He  classi 
fied  his  works  under  a  number  of  not  very  definite 
heads ;  and  under  each  head  printed  his  mate 
rial  chronologically.  The  first  volume  contains 
"  Narrative  and  Legendary  Poems,"  from  1830  to 
1888  ;  the  second  contains  "  Poems  of  Nature," 
from  1830  to  1886,  "Poems  Subjective  and  Rem- 
iniscent,"  from  1841  to  1887,  and  "Religious 
Poems,"  from  1830  to  1886;  the  third  contains 
"Anti-slavery  Poems,"  beginning  with  one  to 
William  Lloyd  Garrison,  in  1832,  and  ending  with 
one  to  his  memory,  in  1879,  and  "  Songs  of  Labor 
and  Reform,"  from  1838  to  1887  ;  the  fourth  con 
tains  "  Personal  Poems,"  from  1834  to  1886,  "Oc 
casional  Poems,"  from  1852  to  1888,  and  reprints 
of  the  "  Tent  on  the  Beach,"  originally  published 
in  1867,  and  of  his  last  volume,  "  At  Sundown," 
which  originally  appeared  shortly  after  his  death. 
In  an  Appendix  are  some  youthful  poems,  written 
as  early  as  1825.  The  prose  works  are  classified  in 
a  similarly  confusing  way.  There  is  a  volume  of 
"  Tales  and  Sketches,"  including  his  essay  in  his- 

*  "The  Writings  of  John  Greenleaf  Whittier."  River 
side  Press :  1893. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF   WHITTIER      1G1 

torical  fiction,  "Margaret  Smith's  Journal  in  the 
Province  of  Massachusetts  Bay,  1678-9 ;  "  a  vol 
ume  of  "Old  Portraits  and  Modern  Sketches," 
"Personal  Sketches  and  Tributes,"  and  "His 
torical  Papers  ;  "  and  a  volume  concerning  the 
"Conflict  with  Slavery,"  "Reform  and  Politics," 
" The  Inner  Life,"  and  "Criticism." 

This  bewildering  arrangement  of  the  work  of 
sixty-seven  years  is  characteristic.  By  far  the 
longest  article  in  any  of  the  seven  volumes  is 
"Margaret  Smith's  Journal,"  which  covers  one 
hundred  and  eighty-six  pages.  By  far  the  greater 
part  of  all  the  work  consists  of  verses  or  papers 
which  could  easily  have  been  written  at  a  short 
sitting.  Uncertain  health,  the  early  practice  of 
journalism,  and  the  lack  of  that  higher  education 
which  demands  prolonged  intellectual  effort  in 
a  single  direction  seem  to  have  combined  in  pre 
venting  the  power  of  sustained  literary  labor. 
As  he  writes  of  himself  :  * 

"  His  good  was  mainly  an  intent, 

His  evil  not  of  forethought  done  ; 
The  work  he  wrought  was  rarely  meant 
Or  finished  as  begun. 

"  The  words  he  spake,  the  thoughts  he  penned, 

Are  mortal  as  his  hand  and  brain, 
But  if  they  serve  the  Master's  end, 
He  has  not  lived  in  vain." 

*  "  My  Namesake,"  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  118,  121. 
11 


162      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

That  last  stanza  is  unduly  modest.  There  are 
passages  in  Whitter's  works  which  have  strength 
and  merit  of  a  kind  that  ought  to  survive.  Of 
his  works  as  wholes,  however,  his  criticism  is 
true.  There  is  hardly  one  in  which  the  vital  pas 
sages  are  not  half-buried  in  irrelevance,  redund 
ance,  or  common-place.  The  veiy  confusion  in 
which  he  finally  presented  his  writings  to  pos 
terity  is  typical  of  his  inability  to  handle  any 
thing  on  a  large  scale. 


To  one  who,  amid  this  confusion,  sets  himself 
to  discover  the  characteristic  traits  of  the  work, 
the  first  salient  features  are  not  its  merits.  Whit- 
tier  was  certainly  precocious.  Certainly,  too,  the 
power  he  displayed  in  youth  did  not  meet  the 
common  fate  of  precocity.  But  the  change  from 
his  earliest  work  to  his  latest  is  surprisingly 
slight.  At  seventeen  he  wrote,  of  the  Merri- 
mac  :* 

"  Oh,  lovely  the  scene,  when  the  gray  misty  vapour 

Of  morning  is  lifted  from  Merrimac's  shore  ; 
When  the  firefly,  lighting  his  wild  gleaming  taper, 
The  dimly  seen  lowlands  comes  glimmering  o'er  ; 

*  Poetical  Works,  iv.,  336.  In  the  rhythm  the  influence 
of  Moore  seems  marked. 


JOHN  GBEENLEAF   WHITTIEU      163 

When  on  thy  calm  surface  the  moonbeam  falls  brightly, 

And  the  dull  bird  of  night  is  his  covert  forsaking, 
When  the  whippoorwill's  notes  from  thy  margin  sound 

lightly, 

And  break  on  the  sound  which  thy  small  waves  are 
making." 

At  thirty-three  he  wrote  of  it  again  :  * 

"  But  look  !  the  yellow  light  no  more 
Streams  down  on  wave  and  verdant  shore  ; 
And  clearly  on  the  calm  air  swells 
The  twilight  voice  of  distant  bells. 
From  Ocean's  bosom,  white  and  thin, 
The  mists  come  slowly  rolling  in  ; 
Hills,  woods,  the  river's  rocky  rim 
Amidst  the  sea-like  vapour  swim, 
While  yonder  lonely  coast-light,  set 
Within  its  wave-washed  minaret, 
Half -quenched,  a  beamless  star  and  pale, 
Shines  dimly  through  its  cloudy  veil !  " 

At  fifty-nine  he  wrote  of  the  light-house  vis 
ible  from  Hampton  Beach  :  f 

"  Just  then  the  ocean  seemed 
To  lift  a  half-faced  moon  in  sight ; 
And  shoreward  o'er  the  waters  gleamed, 
From  crest  to  crest,  a  line  of  light. 

"  Silently  for  a  space  each  eye 
Upon  that  sudden  glory  turned  : 
Cool  from  the  land  the  breeze  blew  by, 
The  tent-ropes  flapped,  the  long  beach  churned 

*  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  12. 
tlbid.,  iv.,  281. 


164      JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WH1TTIER 

Its  waves  to  foam  ;  on  either  hand 
Stretched,  far  as  sight,  the  hills  of  sand ; 

With  bays  of  marsh,  and  capes  of  bush  and  tree, 
The  woods  black   shore-line  loomed  beyond  the 
meadowy  sea." 

And  as  he  dealt  with  Nature  here,  for  above 
forty  years  simply  looking  and  telling  just  what 
he  saw,  so  he  dealt  with  everything  from  be 
ginning  to  end.  For  sixty-seven  years  his  work 
retains  its  chief  characteristics  with  remarkably 
slight  alteration. 

The  most  salient  of  these  characteristics,  as  I 
have  said,  are  not  the  merits.  The  lines  just 
cited  have  an  obvious  air  of  commonplace.  It 
is  deceptive.  As  one  grows  to  know  them,  and 
the  hundreds  of  others  for  which  we  must  let  them 
stand,  one  begins  insensibly  to  realize  that  the 
power  of  selective  observation  which  underlies 
them  is  of  no  common  order.  Commonplace, 
however,  they  surely  look  ;  and  commonplace  be 
yond  all  doubt  are  endless  passages  throughout 
Whittier's  verse.  The  man  lacked  the  saving  grace 
of  humour.  In  all  the  seven  volumes  I  have  found 
but  one  passage  that  really  amused  me  :  this  is 
an  account  in  "Yankee  Gypsies"*  of  how  a 
drunken  vagabond  broke  into  the  Whittier  home 
stead  when  the  men  were  away,  and  made  formal 
love  to  the  dismayed  grandmother,  who  was  born 

*  Prose  Works,  i.,  339. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIEK      105 

Greenleaf.  In  Whittier's  verse  his  lack  of  hu 
mour  is  sometimes  startling.  In  a  poem  *  where 
a  Yankee  stage-driver  describes  the  profoundly 
gracious  merits  of  a  passenger  who  once  made 
him  stop  while  she  sketched  a  panoramic  view, 
occurs  this  stanza : 

"  '  As  good  as  fair  ;  it  seemed  her  joy 

To  comfort  and  to  give  ; 
My  poor,  sick  wife,  and  cripple  boy, 

Will  bless  her  while  they  live  ! ' 
The  tremor  in  the  driver's  tone 

His  manhood  did  not  shame  : 
'  I  dare  say,  sir,  yon  may  have  known ' 

He  named  a  well-known  name." 

And  in  a  poemf  commemorating  a  railway  con 
ductor  who  lost  his  life  in  an  accident,  come 
these  passages : 

u  Lo  !  the  ghastly  lips  of  pain, 
Dead  to  all  thought  save  duty's,  moved  again  : 

*  Put  out  the  signals  for  the  other  train  ! ' 

"  No  nobler  utterance  since  the  world  began 
From  lips  of  saint  or  martyr  ever  ran, 
Electric,  through  the  sympathies  of  man. 

11  Others  he  saved,  himself  he  could  not  save. 

44  Nay,  the  lost  life  was  saved.     He  is  not  dead 
Who  in  his  record  still  the  earth  shall  tread 
With  God's  clear  aureole  shining  round  his  head." 

*  4<  The  Hill-Top  ;  "  Poetical  Works,  iv.,  58. 

t  4l  Conductor  Bradley  ;  "  Poetical  Works,  i.,  359. 


166      JOHN  GREENLEAF   WHITTIEK 

The  noble  simplicity  of  this  second  passage 
does  something  to  atone  for  the  appalling  literal- 
ness  and  the  monstrous  hyperbole  of  the  first. 
One  cannot  help  wondering,  though,  whether  any 
other  writer  of  real  merit  than  Whittier  would 
ever  have  deliberately  reprinted  such  passages 
side  by  side. 

His  lack  of  humour,  then,  was  serious.  So,  to 
a  less  degree,  was  his  lack  of  artistic  feeling. 
The  remarkably  narrow  range  of  his  metrical 
forms,  the  astonishing  errors  of  his  rhymes  are 
familiar  features  of  his  verse.  Another  defect, 
too,  must  have  been  apparent  to  whoever  has 
read  even  the  passages  already  quoted.  He  had 
little  strength  of  creative  imagination.  His 
poetical  figures  are  almost  always  both  obvious 
and  trite.  A  light-house  resembles  a  minaret ; 
the  woods  bordering  a  salt  meadow  are  like  the 
shore  bordering  the  actual  sea ;  a  good  man,  when 
dead,  is  provided  with  an  aureole ;  and  so  on. 
The  moralizing  passages  frequent  throughout  his 
work  display  the  same  weakness.  If  in  his  lack 
of  humour  he  sinks  below  the  commonplace,  there 
is  nothing  in  the  technical  form  of  his  work,  or 
in  the  creative  power  of  his  imagination,  which 
often  rises  above  it. 

VI 

YET  as  one  grows  to  know  the  work  of  Whittier, 
one  grows  insensibly  to  feel  that  essentially  it  is 


JOHN   GREENLEAF   WHITTIER      167 

far  from  commonplace,  that  it  really  deserves  the 
importance  accorded  it  in  contemporary  litera 
ture,  that  no  small  part  of  it  will  probably  out 
live  the  age  to  which  it  was  addressed,  and  per 
haps  even  the  work  of  any  other  contemporary 
American.  I  have  purposely  touched  on  his 
faults,  and  put  them  all  together.  Not  to  have 
recognized  them  would  have  been  deliberately 
not  to  see  him  as  he  was.  In  growing  to  know 
his  work,  these  are  what  one  first  remarks.  By 
and  by  one  finds  them  forgotten  in  a  sense  that 
this  poet,  whom  one  has  grown  to  know,  has 
in  him  lasting  elements  for  which  greatness 
is  perhaps  no  undue  name.  Throughout  the 
work  of  his  sixty -seven  years  one  feels  with 
growing  admiration  a  constant  simplicity  of  feel 
ing  and  of  phrase,  as  pure  as  the  country  air  he 
loved  to  breathe.  One  feels,  too,  constant,  un 
swerving  purity  of  nature,  of  motive,  of  life. 
And  if  one  feel,  too,  the  limits  of  thought  and 
of  experience  that  made  such  purity  and  sim 
plicity  possible  throughout  eighty-five  years  of 
human  existence,  one  is  none  the  sadder  for  that. 
What  Whittier  voiced  was  a  life  that  could  be 
lived  in  our  own  New  England  through  the 
stormiest  years  of  the  Nineteenth  Century.  Lim 
ited  though  it  were,  that  life  throughout,  in 
thought,  in  feeling,  in  word,  in  act,  was  simple 
and  pure — commonplace,  if  you  will,  in  more 
aspects  than  one,  but  in  one  never  commonplace  : 


108      JOHN   GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

never  for  a  moment  was  it  ignoble.  It  has  been 
the  fortune  of  New  England,  above  other  parts  of 
our  country,  to  fix  the  standards  and  the  ideals 
that  have  hitherto  prevailed  throughout  the  con 
tinent  of  North  America.  There  is  courage  in 
the  thought  that  even  in  our  own  time  New 
England  could  bring  forth  and  sustain  such  noble 
purity  as  his. 

To  feel  how  genuine,  how  pure,  how  noble  the 
man  was,  with  all  his  limits,  we  must  consider  his 
work  in  some  detail.  His  own  classification  of 
it,  as  we  have  seen,  is  confusing.  His  prose  work, 
once  for  all,  is  of  little  importance.  It  shows 
him  possessed  of  a  quietly  pleasant  narrative  style, 
and  of  a  controversial  style  which  has  considera 
ble  force.  It  phrases  little  or  nothing,  however, 
that  is  not  equally  phrased  in  his  more  favourite 
vehicle  of  verse.  We  may  best  consider,  then, 
chiefly  his  verse :  first,  that  part  of  it  which  most 
reveals  himself ;  then,  that  which  deals  with  his 
own  experience  of  Nature  ;  then,  his  romantic  nar 
ratives  ;  and  finally,  the  work  which  he  himself 
deemed  most  important — his  life-long  advocacy 
of  human  freedom. 

VII 

IP  masterpiece  be  not  an  extravagant  term  for 
any   work   of  Whittier's,    we   may  perhaps  call 
"  Snow-Bound  "  *  his  masterpiece.    At  fifty-seven, 
*  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  134-159. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIEK      1C9 

when  almost  all  of  his  immediate  family  were 
dead,  lie  wrote  in  tenderly  simple  verse  this  rec 
ord  of  his  earliest  memories.  "  Flemish  pictures 
of  old  days,"  he  calls  it  toward  the  end.  The 
phrase  would  be  apt,  but  that  it  ignores  what 
seems  to  me  the  most  notable  trait  of  all.  Flem 
ish  pictures  one  thinks  of  as  pictures  of  a  peas 
antry.  In  "  Snow-Bound  "  we  have  a  country 
folk  very  rare  in  human  history.  No  life  could 
be  much  simpler,  much  more  remote  from  lux 
urious  comfort  or  lazy  ease  than  the  life  that  is 
pictured  here;  but  for  all  their  brave  rusticity 
these  sturdy  Yankees,  toiling  in  summer  on  their 
rocky  farms,  resting  perforce  in  such  winter 
moments  as  buried  them  in  almost  Arctic  snow 
drifts,  are  no  peasants.  What  makes  them  what 
they  are  is  that  they  are  still  lords  of  themselves 
and  of  the  soil  they  till.  Simple  with  all  the 
simplicity  of  hereditary  farming  folk,  they  are  at 
the  same  time  gentle  with  the  unconscious  grace 
of  people  who  are  aware  of  no  earthly  superiors. 
This  is  the  phase  of  human  nature  that  Whittier 
knew  first  and  best.  This  is  what  he  assumed 
and  believed  that  all  mankind  might  be.  Very 
surely,  too,  this  is  the  stuff  of  which  any  sound 
democracy  must  be  made.  So,  of  this  stormy 
evening,  he  writes  : 

"Shut  in  from  all  the  world  without, 
We  sat  the  clean-winged  hearth  about, 


170      JOHN   GKEENLEAF   WHITTIER 

Content  to  let  the  north-wind  roar 
In  baffled  rage  at  pane  and  door, 
While  the  red  logs  before  us  beat 
The  frost-line  back  with  tropic  heat ; 
And  ever,  when  a  louder  blast 
Shook  beam  and  rafter  as  it  passed, 
The  merrier  up  its  roaring  draught 
The  great  throat  of  the  chimney  laughed  ; 
The  house-dog  on  his  paws  outspread 
Laid  to  the  fire  his  drowsy  head, 
The  cat's  dark  silhouette  on  the  wall 
A  couch  ant  tiger's  seemed  to  fall ; 
And,  for  the  winter  fireside  meet, 
Between  the  andirons'  straggling  feet, 
The  mug  of  cider  *  simmered  slow, 
The  apples  sputtered  in  a  row, 
And,  close  at  hand,  the  basket  stood 
With  nuts  from  brown  October's  wood." 

This  vivid  simplicity  of  description  is  generally 
recognized.  Less  obvious  and  less  certainly 
known  is  the  occasional  ultimate  simplicity  of 
phrase  which  makes  certain  lines  f  in  "  Snow- 
Bound"  notable.  Take  this  reference  to  those 
that  are  no  more  : 

"  We  turn  the  pages  that  they  read, 

Their  written  words  we  linger  o'er, 
But  in  the  sun  they  cast  no  shade, 
No  voice  is  heard,  no  sign  is  made, 
No  step  is  on  the  conscious  floor  !  " 

*It  has  generally  been  customary  in  New  England,  I 
am  told,  not  to  deem  cider  spirituous, 
t  In  the  following  passages  the  italics  are  mine. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      171 

Again,  take  this  couplet  about  the  maiden  aunt, 
so  familiar  a  figure  in  New  England  households  : 

11  All  unprofaned  she  held  apart 
The  virgin  fancies  of  the  heart." 

Again,  these  lines,  for  once  imaginative  : 

u  How  many  a  poor  one's  blessing  went 
With  thee  beneath  the  low  green  tent 
Whose  curtain  never  outward  swings." 


Again  : 


"  But  still  I  wait  with  ear  and  eye 
For  something  gone  that  should  be  nigh, 
A  loss  in  all  familiar  things, 
In  flower  that  blooms,  and  bird  that  sings." 

Again  still : 

"  And  while  in  life's  late  afternoon, 

Where  cool  and  long  the  shadows  grow, 

I  walk  to  meet  the  night  that  soon 
Shall  shape  and  shadow  overflow, 

I  cannot  feel  that  thou  art  far." 

It  was  from  such  memories  as  these,  thus  re 
membered,  that  he  went  to  his  work  in  this  world. 
The  very  first  poem  in  his  class  of  "  Subjective 
and  Reminiscent "  suggests,  too,  what  rarely  ap 
pears  in  his  writing,  that  he  had  tender  memories, 
of  a  less  domestic  nature.  For  these  verses,  ad 
dressed  at  the  age  of  twenty-three  to  a  lady  of 


172      JOHN   GREENLEAF   WHITTIEK 

Calvinistic  tendencies,  from  whom  he  seems  to 
have  been  long  parted,  contain  this  passage  :  * 

"  Ere  this,  thy  quiet  eye  hath  smiled 
My  picture  of  thy  youth  to  see, 

When,  half  a  woman,  half  a  child, 

Thy  very  artlessness  beguiled, 
And  folly'1  s  self  seemed  wise  in  thee." 

His  chief  work,  as  we  have  seen,  he  believed  to 
be  the  work  of  reform.  The  personal  effects  of 
such  work  he  felt  sensibly.  At  thirty-five  he 
wrote  of  himself  for  a  lady's  album  :f 

''  A  banished  name  from  Fashion's  sphere, 
A  lay  unheard  of  Beauty's  ear, 
Forbid,  disowned, — what  do  they  here?  " 

At  forty-five,  in  lines  to  his  Namesake, J  he  draws 
his  own  portrait : 

"  Some  blamed  him,  some  believed  him  good; 

The  truth  lay  doubtless  'twixt  the  two  ; 
He  reconciled  as  best  he  could 
Old  faith  and  fancies  new. 


He  loved  his  friends,  forgave  his  foes ; 

And,  if  his  words  were  harsh  at  times, 
He  spared  his  fellow-men, — his  blows 

Fell  only  on  their  crimes. 

*  "  Memories  "  ;  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  96. 
t  "  Ego  "  ;  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  102. 
\ Poetical  Works,  ii.,  116. 


JOHN   GEEENLEAF  WHITTIER      173 

"Ho  loved  the  great  and  wise,  but  found 

His  human  heart  to  all  akin 
Who  met  him  on  the  common  ground 
Of  suffering  and  sin. 


Ill  served  his  tides  of  feeling  strong 
To  turn  the  common  mills  of  use  ; 

And,  over  restless  wings  of  song, 
His  birthright  garb  hung  loose  ! 

1  His  eye  was  beauty's  powerless  slave, 

And  his  the  ear  which  discord  pains ; 
Few  guessed  beneath  his  aspect  grave 
What  passions  strove  in  chains. 

'  He  worshipped  as  his  fathers  did, 

And  kept  the  faith  of  childish  days, 
And,  howsoe'er  he  strayed  or  slid, 
He  loved  the  good  old  ways — 

1  The  simple  tastes,  the  kindly  traits, 

The  tranquil  air,  and  gentle  speech, 
The  silence  of  the  soul  that  waits 
For  more  than  man  to  teach. 


"  And  listening  with  his  forehead  bowed, 

Heard  the  Divine  compassion  fill 
The  pauses  of  the  trump  and  cloud 
With  whispers  small  and  still." 

However  his  actual  belief  may  have  been  affected 
by  the  immense  growth  of  devout  free  thought 


174      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIEE 

about  him,  he  never  for  a  moment  faltered  in 
faith  that  the  inner  light  of  the  Friends  is  real. 
On  his  sixty-fourth  birthday,  he  wrote  :  * 

u  God  is,  and  all  is  well ! 

"  His  light  shines  on  me  from  above, 

His  low  voice  speaks  within, — 
The  patience  of  immortal  love 
Outwearyi)ig  mortal  sin." 

And  again,  at  seventy-eight :  f 

u  By  all  that  He  requires  of  me, 
I  know  what  God  himself  must  be. 

u  No  picture  to  my  aid  I  call, 

I  shape  no  image  in  my  prayer  ; 
I  only  know  in  Him  is  all 

Of  life,  light,  beauty,  everywhere." 

In  his  last  volume  are  some  lines  J  which  must 
have  been  written  about  this  time,  concerning  an 
outdoor  reception,  where  some  young  girls  had 
pleased  him  : 

"  But  though  I  feel,  with  Solomon, 
'Tis  pleasant  to  behold  the  sun, 
I  would  not  if  I  could  repeat 
A  life  which  still  is  good  and  sweet ; 

*  "  My  Birthday  "  ;  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  164. 

t  "Revelation"  ;  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  343. 

t  u  An  Outdoor  Reception"  ;  Poetical  Works,  iv.,  297. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      175 

I  keep  in  age,  as  in  my  prime, 
A  not  uncheerful  step  with  time. 


tl  On  easy  terms  with  law  and  fate, 
For  what  must  he  I  calmly  wait, 
And  trust  the  path  I  cannot  see, — 
That  God  is  good  sufficeth  me." 


VIII 

WITH  less  quotation  we  could  hardly  have  ap 
preciated  the  effect  of  Whittier's  personality  that 
emerges  from  these  self-expressive  poems.  Super 
ficially  commonplace  in  their  simplicity,  they 
really  express  a  character  in  which  the  simple  vir 
tues  of  New  England  are  so  firmly  rooted  that  by 
very  force  of  its  unassuming  strength  it  becomes 
strongly  individual.  It  is  pervaded,  however, 
with  true  Yankee  melancholy,  for  which,  so  far 
as  we  have  yet  seen,  there  was  no  help  but  what 
might  be  found  in  fervent  religion  and  its  accom 
panying  duties.  Throughout  life,  however,  Whit- 
tier  had  another  resource.  To  quote  once  more 
from  the  poem  to  his  namesake,  from  which  I 
have  already  quoted  much  : 

"  Yet  Heaven  was  kind,  and  here  a  bird 

And  there  a  flower  beguiled  his  way  ; 
And,  cool,  in  summer  noons,  he  heard 
The  fountains  plash  and  play. 


176      JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIEK 

"On  all  his  sad  or  restless  moods 

The  patient  peace  of  Nature  stole  ; 
The  quiet  of  the  fields  and  woods 
Sank  deep  into  his  soul." 

In  other  words,  Whittier  found  in  the  contem 
plation  of  New  England  landscape  the  most  con 
stant,  lasting  pleasure  of  his  life. 

In  his  collected  works,  the  poems  he  classifies 
as  "  of  Nature  "  fill  only  eighty-six  pages.  In  re 
ality,  poetry  of  Nature  pervades  his  whole  work. 
Under  this  head,  for  example,  may  clearly  fall 
the  first  lines  to  the  Merrimac  which  I  quoted,* 
and  the  passage  concerning  night-fall  on  Hamp 
ton  Beach,f  as  well  as  a  great  part  of  "Snow- 
Bound."  Yet  all  these  are  classified  elsewhere. 
So  are  numberless  passages  like  the  following, 
which  to  his  mind  is  apparently  either  narrative 
or  legendary :  J 

"  Along  the  roadside,  like  the  flowers  of  gold 
The  tawny  Incas  for  their  gardens  wrought, 
Heavy  with  sunshine  droops  the  golden-rod, 
And  the  red  pennons  of  the  cardinal-flowers 
Hang  motionless  upon  their  upright  staves. 
The  sky  is  hot  and  hazy,  and  the  wind, 
Wing- weary  with  its  long  flight  from  the  south, 
Unfelt ;  yet,  closely  scanned,  yon  maple  leaf 
With  faintest  motion,  as  one  stirs  in  dreams, 

*  Page  103.  t  Page  163. 

t"  Among  the  Hills;"  Poetical  Works,  i.,  260.  It  is 
fair  to  add  that  this  extract  is  from  the  Prelude. 


JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER      177 

Confesses  it.     The  locust  by  the  wall 
Stabs  the  noon-silence  with  his  sharp  alarm. 
A  single  hay-cart  down  the  dusty  road 
Creaks  slowly,  with  its  driver  fast  asleep 
On  the  load's  top.     Against  the  neighboring  hill, 
Huddled  along  the  stone-wall's  shady  side, 
The  sheep  show  white,  as  if  a  snow-drift  still 
Defied  the  dog-star.     Through  the  open  door 
A  drowsy  smell  of  flowers — gray  heliotrope, 
And  whita  sweet  clover,  and  shy  mignonette — 
Comes  faintly  in,  and  silent  chorus  lends 
To  the  prevailing  symphony  of  peace." 

Everywhere  in  Whittier's  work  one  may  find 
such  pictures.  Quite  to  appreciate  them,  per 
haps,  one  must  know  the  country  they  deal  with. 
The  regions  of  New  England  that  Whittier  knew 
have  a  character  peculiarly  their  own.  The  rocky 
coast  between  Cape  Aim  and  the  Piscataqua, 
broken  by  long  stretches  of  beach  ;  the  marshes, 
dotted  with  great  stacks  of  salt  hay,  stretching 
back  to  the  woods  or  the  farms  of  the  solid  laud  ; 
the  rolling  country,  with  its  elms  and  pines,  its 
gnarled  apple-orchards,  its  gray  wooden  farm 
houses  ;  and  almost  within  sight  the  lower  spurs 
of  the  New  Hampshire  hills,  bristling  with  a 
stubble  of  young  woods,  are  unlike  any  other 
country  I  know.  Such  subtile  impressions  as 
mark  the  individuality  of  a  region  are  unmis 
takable,  but  almost  beyond  the  power  of  words  to 
phrase.  Perhaps  the  trait  which  most  distin 
guishes  this  country  that  Whittier  so  knew  and 


178      JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER 

loved,  is  a  nearer  approach  to  the  suggestion  of  a 
romantic  past  than  is  common  in  North  America. 
Far  as  the  eye  can  reach  or  the  foot  travel,  this 
region  has  been  the  home  of  our  own  race  for 
above  two  centuries.  It  has  its  own  traditions, 
its  own  legends.  It  is  humanized  in  a  way  al 
most  European.  Yet  its  legends  and  its  tra 
ditions  belong  to  a  past  not  of  civilized  or  me 
diaeval  grandeur,  but  of  savage  wildness.  And 
its  actual  prosperity  is  past  or  passing — but  for 
great  factories,  swarming  with  foreign  operatives, 
or  for  summer  visitors  who  come  to  idle  in  the 
regions  where  the  toil  of  the  past  generations 
bred  the  race  that  has  tamed  a  savage  continent. 

In  these  regions  it  was  Whittier's  lot  to  know 
the  last  days  of  the  olden  time  and  the  first  of 
the  new.  He  loved  the  old  days  for  their  hardy 
virtues  ;  his  faith  in  human  nature,  always  guided 
by  the  inner  light,  allowed  him  no  misgivings  for 
the  future.  In  "Cobbler  Keezar's  Vision,"  *  tlio 
German  wizard  finds  the  Merrirnac  of  the  future, 
with  its  scores  of  mill-wheels,  and  its  white-walled 
farm-houses,  and  its  floating  flags  of  freedom, 
a  lovelier  sight  than  his  memories  of  the  vine- 
clad  Rhine,  with  its  clowns  and  puppets,  its  flag 
ons  and  its  despotism.  Whittier  found  the  Mer- 
rimac  lovelier  himself — a  task  in  which  he  was 
probably  helped  by  the  narrow  limits  of  his 

*  Poetical  Works,  i.,  241. 


JOHN  GEEENLEAF  WHITTIEE      179 

travels.  He  loved  the  Nature  about  him.  He 
found  in  it  something  which  constantly  reward 
ed  and  strengthened  his  life-long  love. 

Expressing  this  constant  delight  in  the  country 
that  his  verses  have  made  peculiarly  his  own,  he 
accomplished,  half  unwittingly,  the  work  which  in 
all  likelihood  will  ultimately  be  thought  his  best. 
One  may  question,  if  one  choose,  the  merit  of  his 
personal  and  religious  poems  ;  one  may  find  his 
romantic  narratives  trivial,  and  his  passionate 
advocacy  of  reform  blind,  dangerous,  truculent ; 
but  one  cannot  deny  that  he  has  seen  the  land 
scapes  of  his  own  New  England  with  an  eye  as 
searching  as  it  was  loving,  or  that  he  has  told 
us  what  he  saw  so  simply,  so  truly,  so  constantly 
that,  however  time  or  chance  may  change  in 
years  to  come  the  face  of  the  regions  he  knew  so 
well,  the  things  he  saw  and  loved  may  be  seen 
and  loved  throughout  time  by  all  who  will  but 
read.  The  peculiar  character  of  his  poetry  of 
Nature  is  that  it  is  not  interpretative  but  faith 
fully  representative.  The  examples  of  it  already 
quoted  are  enough  to  show  this  trait.  There  are 
critics,  then,  and  real  lovers  of  poetry,  who  find 
his  work  harshly  literal,  unimaginative,  prosaic. 
Such  critics,  I  think,  will  not  let  themselves  sym 
pathize  with  the  exquisitely  sympathetic  sense  of 
fact  which  underlies  his  utter  simplicity.  When 
he  tried  to  interpret,  he  added  nothing  to  his 
work.  When  he  was  content  to  tell  us  what  he 


180      JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER 

saw,  lie  showed  us  constantly  what  many  of  us 
should  never  have  seen  for  ourselves  ;  and  this  he 
showed  so  truly  that,  as  in  the  course  of  centuries 
proves  true  of  the  art  which  the  centuries  pro 
nounce  great,  each  one  of  us  may  in  turn  inter 
pret  it  anew  for  himself,  just  as  each  may  in 
terpret  for  himself  the  life  that  passes  before  his 
living  eyes. 


IX 


IN  this  constant  strength  of  his  instinctive 
fidelity  to  Nature,  Whittier  distinguishes  him 
self  from  almost  all  other  American  men  of  let 
ters.  In  most  of  our  literature  there  is  a  quality 
of  consciousness.  Sometimes  this  takes  the  form 
of  aggressive  cleverness  ;  sometimes  it  deliber 
ately  assumes  the  traditional  dignity  of  culture ; 
often  —  and  perhaps  most  characteristically — it 
half-consciously,  half-unwittingly  follows  or  re 
vives  tradition.  As  somebody  has  extravagantly 
said,  American  verse  swarms  with  nightingales — 
a  bird  unknown  on  this  continent.  For  this  state 
of  things  there  is  a  reason  which  these  perhaps 
imaginary  nightingales  typify.  An  American 
would  not  be  a  true  son  of  the  fathers  if  he  did 
not  instinctively  love  tradition.  The  emigrants 
brought  from  the  Old  World  fireside  tales  of 
things  and  folks,  of  pomps  and  grandeurs,  of 
comedies  and  tragedies  which  their  children  could 


JOHN  GEEENLEAF  WHITTIER      181 

never  know  in  the  flesh.  And  history  has  moved 
fast  with  us,  and  society  has  been  overturned 
more  than  once.  And  Western  children  to-day 
are  listening  to  such  stories  of  New  England  as 
Yankee  children  of  the  early  days  heard  about 
Old  England  itself.  This  love  of  tradition,  which 
shows  itself  perhaps  most  markedly  in  the  pas 
sion  for  genealogy  which  permeates  New  Eng 
land,  is  a  prime  trait  of  the  true  Yankee.  Whit- 
tier  was  as  true  a  Yankee  as  ever  lived.  His  first 
published  volume,  we  remember,  was  a  volume 
of  "  New  England  Legends."  New  England  le 
gends  he  continued  to  write  almost  all  his  life  ; 
and,  as  his  reading  extended,  he  wrote  many 
other  legends,  too,  of  regions  and  races  that  he 
had  never  known  in  the  flesh. 

Of  the  latter  little  need  be  said.  They  are 
not  profoundly  characteristic.  He  got  them 
from  books,  and  he  put  them  into  other  books, 
where  their  simple  ballad-form  makes  them  pleas 
antly  readable.  He  generally  managed  to  infuse 
into  them  a  certain  amount  of  blameless  moraliz 
ing  which  does  not  enhance  their  stimulating 
quality.  On  the  whole,  we  may  class  them  with 
that  great  body  of  innocuous  American  verse 
which  is  permeated  with  the  innocent  unreality 
of  conscious  culture. 

The  New  England  legends  are  of  firmer  stuff. 
In  his  prose  works  one  finds  some  of  the  material 
that  goes  to  make  them.  "Charms  and  Fairy 


182      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

Faith,"  and  "Magicians  and  Witch  Folk  "*  tell 
of  such  actual  traditions  as  were  kept  alive  at  the 
snow-bound  fireside.  "  Margaret  Smith's  Jour 
nal,"!  while  no  permanent  contribution  to  his 
torical  fiction,  is  so  true  a  picture  of  the  Seven 
teenth  Century  in  New  England  as  to  prove 
beyond  peradventure  the  solidity  of  Whittier's 
study  in  local  history.  And  verses  like  these  J 
show  how  well  he  knew  the  ancestral  Puritans  : 

"  With  the  memory  of  that  morning  by  the  summer  sea  I 

blend 
A  wild    and  wondrous  story,   by  the  younger  Mather 

penned, 
In  that  quaint  Magnolia  Christi,  with  all  strange  and 

marvellous  things, 
Heaped  up  huge  and  undigested,  like  the  chaos  Ovid 

sings. 

"  Dear  to  me  these  far,  faint  glimpses  of  the  dual  life  of 

old, 
Inward,  grand  with  awe  and  reverence ;  outward,  mean 

and  coarse  and  cold  ; 
Gleams  of  mystic  beauty  playing  over  dull  and  vulgar 

clay, 
Golden-threaded  fancies  weaving  in  a  web  of  hodden 

gray." 

His  romantic  and  legendary  narratives  of  New 
England,  then,  have  much  of  the  true  flavour  of 

*  Prose  Works,  i.,  385,  399.  t  Ibid.,  9. 

\  '•  The  Garrison  of  Cape  Ann ;  "  Poetical  Works,  i.,  1G6. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      183 

the  soil.  He  seems  to  have  been  haunted,  how 
ever,  by  a  lurking  Yankee  conscience  which  con 
stantly  suggested  doubts  as  to  whether  it  is  quite 
right  to  tell  a  good  story  just  for  its  own  sake. 
His  introduction  to  the  "Tent  on  the  Beach,"* 
the  volume  which  contained,  on  the  whole,  his 
most  effective  narrative  poems,  is  distinctly  apol 
ogetic.  Here,  at  fifty-nine,  he  writes  : 

"  I  would  not  sin  in  this  half-playful  strain, — 

Too  light  perhaps  for  serious  years,  though  born 

Of  the  enforced  leisure  of  slow  pain, — 
Against  the  pure  ideal  which  has  drawn 

My  feet  to  follow  its  far-shining  gleam. " 

As  a  result  of  this  state  of  things,  his  narratives 
of  New  England  tradition  generally  deal  with 
such  phases  of  it  as  have  perceptible  didactic  sig 
nificance.  Naturally,  he  represents  the  Quakers 
heroically.  A  typical  stanza  is  this,  from  the 
"King's  Missive,"  written  at  seventy-two  :  f 

"  '  Off  with  the  knave's  hat ! '     An  angry  hand 

Smote  down  the  offence ;  but  the  wearer  said, 
With  a  quiet  smile,  '  By  the  king's  command 
I  bear  his  message  and  stand  in  his  stead. ' 
In  the  Governor's  hand  a  missive  he  laid 
With  the  royal  arms  on  its  seal  displayed, 

*  Poetical  Works,  iv.,  227. 

t  Ibid.,  i.,  383.      We  must  remember  that  Quaker  prin 
ciples  forbade  salutation  by  uncovering  the  head. 


184      JOHN  GREENLEAF   WHITTIER 

And  the  proud  man  spake  as  he  glanced  thereat, 
Uncovering,  '  Give  Mr.  Shattuck  his  hat.'" 

Indubitably  didactic  in  motive,  too,  are  those 
two  narrative  poems  of  his  which  are  apparently 
most  familiar  :  "  Maud  Muller,"  *  written  at  forty- 
six  ;  and  ' '  Skipper  Ireson's  Ride,"  f  written  at 
forty-nine.  The  merits  and  the  limits  of  his 
work  in  this  kind  are  patent  in  "  Maud  Muller." 
The  little  poem  is  very  simple,  and  in  its  conven 
tional  sentimentality  is  very  acceptable  to  the 
great  American  public.  In  its  presentation  of  a 
Yankee  judge  in  the  character  of  a  knightly  hero 
of  romance,  it  is  artlessly  consonant  with  the  so 
cial  ideals  of  the  Yankee  country ;  so,  too,  in  its 
tacit  assumption  that  the  good  looks  of  a  bare 
foot  country  beauty  would  really  have  been  more 
congenial  life-companions  in  an  eminent  legal 
career  than  the  rich  dower  and  the  fashionable 
tendencies  of  the  lady  whom  the  Judge  ultimately 
married  in  deference  to 

"  his  sisters  proud  and  cold, 
And  his  mother,  vain  of  her  rank  and  gold." 

If  this  sort  of  thing  were  canting,  it  would  be 
abominable.  What  saves  it  is  that  it  rings  true. 
The  man  meant  it  seriously.  We  may  smile  at 
his  simplicity,  if  we  like;  but  we  can  hardly 
help  loving  him  for  it.  Indeed,  it  is  almost 

*  Poetical  Works,  i. ,  148.  t  Ibid. ,  1 74. 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      185 

enough  to  make  us  forgive  that  insidiously  dread 
ful  rhyme — 

"  For  of  all  sad  words  of  tongue  or  pen, 
The  saddest  are  these  :   '  It  might  have  been  ! '  " 

"Skipper  Ireson's  Ride,"  on  the  other  hand, 
has  much  of  the  true  ballad  quality  : 

"  Body  of  turkey,  head  of  owl, 
Wings  a-droop  like  a  rained-on  fowl, 
Feathered  and  ruffled  in  every  part, 
Skipper  Ireson  stood  in  the  cart. 
Scores  of  women,  old  and  young, 
Strong  of  muscle  and  glib  of  tongue, 
Pushed  and  pulled  up  the  rocky  lane, 
Shouting  and  singing  the  shrill  refrain  : 
1  Here's  Flud  Oirson,  fur  his  horrd  horrt, 
Torr'd  an'  futherr'd  an'  corr'd  in  a  corrt 
By  the  women  o'  Morble'ead  !  ' ' 

Such  a  subject  as  this  stirred  the  Yankee 
Quaker  to  the  depths.  A  human  being,  deaf  to 
the  still  small  voice,  had  acted  devilishly.  The 
weakest  creatures  of  his  seaside  home  had  ris 
en  up  against  him ;  and,  not  overstepping  the 
bounds  of  due  punishment,  had  held  him  up  last 
ingly  to  public  scorn  and  detestation.  It  is  per 
haps  instructive,  in  connection  with  such  reform 
ing  enthusiasm  as  pervades  this  spirited  ballad, 
to  learn  from  a  note  in  the  final  edition  *  that, 
twenty-two  years  after  the  original  publication, 

*  Poetical  Works,  i.,  174. 


186      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

Whittier  was  credibly  informed  that  Ireson  had 
really  been  innocent.  Against  the  skipper's  will, 
it  appeared,  his  refractory  crew  had  compelled 
him  to  desert  his  sinking  townsfolk ;  and  then,  to 
screen  themselves,  they  had  falsely  accused  him, 
with  the  direful  result  commemorated  by  the  poet. 
His  answer  to  his  informant  is  characteristic  : 

UI  have  now  no  doubt  that  thy  version  of  Skipper  Ire- 
son's  ride  is  the  correct  one.  My  verse  was  founded  solely 
on  a  fragment  of  rhyme  which  I  heard  from  one  of  my 
early  schoolmates,  a  native  of  Marblehead. 

"I  supposed  the  story  to  which  it  referred  dated  back  at 
least  a  century.  I  knew  nothing  of  the  participators,  and 
the  narrative  of  the  ballad  was  pure  fancy.  I  am  glad 
for  the  sake  of  truth  and  justice  that  the  real  facts  are 
given  in  thy  book.  I  certainly  would  not  knowingly  do 
injustice  to  any  one,  dead  or  living." 

And  having  thus,  introductorily,  done  full  justice 
to  the  memory  of  poor  Floyd  Ireson,  he  proceeds 
to  reprint  his  ballad. 

In  touching  these  narrative  and  legendary  poems 
of  Whittier,  I  have  perhaps  allowed  myself  to  lay 
undue  emphasis  on  phases  of  them  that  are  not 
their  best.  One  and  all  of  them  we  may  cer 
tainly  call  simple,  earnest,  artless,  and  beautifully 
true  to  the  native  traditions  and  temper  of  New 
England.  In  that  last  fact,  however,  which  I  have 
tried  to  emphasize,  lies  their  weakness  as  litera 
ture.  The  temper  of  New  England  is  essentially 
serious,  always  uncomfortable  if  it  cannot  defend 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      187 

itself  on  firm  ethical  grounds.  Thoroughly  good 
narrative,  on  the  other  hand,  ought  to  be  as  free 
from  obvious  ethical  admixture  as  are  the  ex 
quisitely  pure  descriptions  of  New  England  land 
scape,  which  seem  to  me  Whittier's  most  lasting 
work.  At  times  these  narratives  of  his  blend 
almost  inextricably  with  his  poems  of  Nature ; 
from  the  narratives  may  be  selected  extracts 
which,  in  simple  descriptive  power,  are  as  beau 
tiful  as  anything  Whittier  ever  did.  In  general, 
however,  the  impression  that  these  narratives 
make  is  one  of  saturation  with  the  traditional  eth 
ical  ideals  of  New  England,  curiously  combined 
with  that  constant  reliance  on  inner  inspiration 
toward  the  Right  which  is  the  fundamental  tenet 
of  the  Quaker  faith.  All  men  are  really  equal,  he 
assumes  throughout,  all  ought  to  be  really  free  ; 
let  them  be  free,  and  all  they  have  to  do  is  to  fol 
low  the  inner  light.  And  here  these  narrative 
poems  touch  close,  on  the  other  hand,  the  works 
which  Whittier  deemed  his  best — his  works  for 
reform.  A  passage  like  this,  which  closes  the 
"  King's  Missive,"  *  might  have  belonged  to 
either  class  : 

11  The  Puritan  spirit  perishing  not, 

To  Concord's  yeomen  the  signal  sent, 
And  spake  in  the  voice  of  the  cannon-shot 
That  severed  the  chains  of  a  continent. 

*  PoeticalWorks,  L,  380. 


188      JOHN  GEEENLEAF  WHITTIEK 

With  its  gentler  message  of  peace  and  good-will 
The  thought  of  the  Quaker  is  living  still, 
And  the  freedom  of  soul  he  prophesied 
Is  gospel  and  law  where  the  martyrs  died." 


FBOM  beginning  to  end,  Whittier  was  an  hon 
est  champion  of  human  freedom.  We  have  seen 
enough  of  the  peculiar  religious  faith  from  which 
he  never  swerved,  to  understand  how  inevitable 
such  a  position  must  have  seemed  to  him.  We 
have  seen  enough  of  his  own  almost  childlike 
simplicity  and  honesty  of  temperament  to  under 
stand  the  whole-souled,  unhesitating  vigour  with 
which  he  threw  himself  into  the  task  to  which  he 
felt  himself  called.  To  every  human  being,  he  be 
lieved,  God  has  given  the  inner  light.  Leave  hu 
man  beings  free  to  act,  then,  as  God  meant  them 
to  act,  and  God's  will  shall  be  done.  The  voice  of 
the  people  is  literally  the  voice  of  God  ;  it  is  the 
concrete,  numerical  expression  of  the  whisperings 
of  the  still  small  voice.  Whether  the  human  form 
to  which  the  voice  whispers  be  European,  Asiatic, 
African,  or  American,  makes  no  manner  of  differ 
ence.  Difference  of  race  is  merely  a  variety  of 
complexion ;  a  majority  of  negroes  is  as  divinely 
true  a  force  as  a  majority  of  Puritan  farmers. 
Are  not  all  alike  made  in  God's  image,  all  alike 
human,  all  alike  accessible  to  the  inner  light  and 


JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIEB      189 

the  still  small  voice  which  can  lead  only  toward 
the  Truth?  Admit  such  premises — and  Whit  tier 
never  for  a  moment  doubted  them — and  there  is 
room  for  only  one  conclusion  :  Whatever  opposes 
any  form  of  human  freedom  is  against  God's  will. 
Not  to  proclaim  this  truth — not  to  assert  it  in 
every  word  and  deed — is  to  be  what  Whittier 
could  never  have  been,  a  deliberate  coward. 

In  the  course  of  his  life  he  advocated  more  re 
forms  than  one.  His  conduct  in  regard  to  the 
abolition  of  slavery,  however,  is  typical  of  his 
conduct  throughout.  It  will  serve  our  purpose  to 
consider  that  alone. 

Quite  to  appreciate  the  courage  implied  in  the 
public  assertion  of  anti-slavery  opinions  sixty 
years  ago  demands  to-day  no  small  effort  of  im 
agination.  It  was  far  greater  than  that  which 
would  be  shown  to-day  by  an  ambitious  aspirant 
for  public  honours  who  should  honestly  and  openly 
question  the  wisdom  of  the  ultimate  abolition  of 
slavery.  To-day  such  an  opinion,  which  was  the 
dominant  opinion  in  1830,  could  result  in  no 
worse  harm  than  political  ridicule  or  neglect. 
It  would  hardly  diminish  the  number  or  the  cor 
diality  of  one's  social  invitations.  In  1830  an 
Abolitionist  was  held  little  less  than  treasonable. 
Social  ostracism  was  almost  certainly  his  due. 
His  very  person  was  not  safe  from  public  attack  ; 
and  the  blind  hostility  of  the  mob — which  for 
some  years  to  come  was  far  too  noisy  to  detect  the 


190      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

whisperings  of  any  still  small  voice — was  con 
firmed  by  that  profoundly  honest  belief  in  the 
public  duty  of  maintaining  existing  institutions 
which  has  always  characterized  the  better  classes 
in  any  community  of  British  origin.  Perhaps  the 
closest  analogy  which  we  can  imagine  to-day  to 
the  Abolitionists  of  1833  would  be  a  body  of 
earnest,  God-fearing  men  who  should  be  con 
vinced  that  God  bade  them  cry  out  against  the 
institution  of  marriage. 

In  the  face  of  such  a  state  of  public  opinion  as 
this,  Whittier  never  for  a  moment  faltered.  He 
knew  he  was  right.  The  one  curse  spared  him 
was  the  curse  of  even  momentary  doubt.  Shy  in 
temperament,  loving  most  of  all  the  simple  seclu 
sion  of  his  native  country,  he  never  hesitated  to 
speak  and  to  act  with  all  his  power  for  the  cause 
of  human  freedom.  That  enfranchisement,  in  the 
broadest  sense,  could  possibly  result  only  in  a 
new  phase  of  evil,  he  never  dreamt  to  the  end. 
He  was  a  man.  Negroes,  Indians,  Chinamen, 
Polish  Jews,  are  men,  too.  Let  all  have  equal 
rights,  all  an  equal  voice,  all  be  equal  in  the  sight 
of  man  as  they  are  eternally  equal  in  the  sight  of 
God. 

What  he  actually  did  we  have  seen  in  our 
brief  record  of  his  life.  That  brief  record  has  been 
enough  to  show  that  the  dreadful  fact  of  slavery 
was  a  fact  of  which  he  had  little  direct  knowl 
edge.  He  was  at  Washington  in  1845.  Apart 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER      191 

from  that  his  knowledge  of  actual  slaves  must 
have  been  derived  chiefly  from  fugitives,  whose 
versions  of  their  experience  must  wholly  have 
confirmed  his  most  extreme  views.  But  what 
mattered  that  ?  When  one  knows  a  thing  evil, 
one  need  not  study  it  in  detail  to  know  that  right 
and  justice  demand  its  extinction.  From  such 
fanatical,  heroic  logic  there  is  no  escape.  We 
have  seen,  I  said,  what  his  actual  conduct  was. 
For  thirty  years  and  more  his  words  supported, 
defended,  urged  on  such  lines  of  conduct.  Oc 
casionally,  in  his  own  phrase,* 

"  The  cant  of  party,  school,  and  sect, 

Provoked  at  times  his  honest  scorn, 
And  Folly,  in  its  gray  respect, 
He  tossed  on  satire's  horn." 

As  we  have  seen,  though,  he  lacked  humour  or 
wit  to  make  his  satire  really  powerful  or  tren 
chant.  His  words  that  really  did  their  work,  the 
words  that  still  tell  the  story  of  the  great  public 
movement  in  which  he  was  a  foremost  figure, 
were  those  simple,  passionate  utterances  that  came 
straight  from  his  heart. 

There  is  room  here  to  quote  only  a  few.  But 
a  very  few  should  suffice  to  give  some  taste  of  the 
quality  of  all. 

At  twenty-six   he   wrote,   for  the  meeting   of 

*  Poetical  Works,  ii.,  1:30. 


192      JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

the  Anti-Slavery  Society  in  New  York,  a  hymn.* 
Here  are  a  few  stanzas  : 

"  When  from  each  temple  of  the  free, 

A  nation's  voice  ascends  to  Heaven, 
Most  Holy  Father !  unto  Thee 

May  not  our  humble  prayer  be  given  ? 

uThy  children  all,  though  hue  and  form 

Are  varied  in  Thine  own  good  will, 

With  Thy  own  holy  breathings  warm, 

And  fashioned  in  Thine  image  still. 

"For  broken  heart,  and  clouded  mind, 

Whereon  no  human  mercies  fall ; 
Oh,  be  Thy  gracious  love  inclined, 
Who,  as  a  Father,  pitiest  all  ! 

"  And  grant,  O  Father  !  that  the  time 

Of  Earth's  deliverance  may  be  near, 
When  every  land  and  tongue  and  clime 
The  message  of  Thy  love  shall  hear." 

At  twenty-eight,  when  resolutions  had  been 
adopted  in  Congress  forbidding  the  postal  cir 
culation  of  anti-slavery  literature,  he  wrote  a 
u  Summons  "  f  to  the  North.  Here  is  a  touch  of 
its  quality  : 

u  Methinks  from  all  her  wild,  green  mountains  ; 
From  valleys  where  her  slumbering  fathers  lie ; 
From  her  blue  rivers  and  her  welling  fountains, 
And  clear,  cold  sky  ; 

*  Poetical  Works,  iii.,  29.  t  Ibid.,  40. 


JOHN  GEEENLEAF   WHITTIEB      193 

"  From  her  rough  coast  and  isles,  which  hungry  Ocean 

Gnaws  with  his  surges  ;  from  the  fisher's  skiff, 
With  white  sail  swaying  to  the  billows'  motion 
Round  rock  and  cliff; 

u  From  the  free  fireside  of  her  unbought  farmer ; 
From  her  free  laborer  at  his  loom  and  wheel ; 
From  the  brown  smith- shop,  where,  beneath  the  hammer, 
Rings  the  red  steel ; 

"  From  each  and  all,  if  God  hath  not  forsaken 

Our  land,  and  left  us  to  an  evil  choice, 
Loud  as  the  summer  thunderbolt  shall  waken 
A  People's  voice. 

'•  Startling  and  stern  !  the  Northern  winds  shall  bear  it 

Over  Potomac's  to  St.  Mary's  wave  ; 
And  buried  Freedom  shall  awake  to  hear  it 
Within  her  grave. " 

At  thirty-five  he  wrote  the  passionate  address, 
"Massachusetts  to  Virginia,"*  concerning  the 
seizure  in  Boston  of  one  Latimer,  a  fugitive 
slave.  To  appreciate  its  stirring  vigour  one 
should  read  it  all.  But  here  is  a  bit  of  it : 

"  From  Norfolk's  ancient  villages,  from  Plymouth's  rocky 

bound 

To  where  Nantucket  feels  the  arms  of  ocean  close  her 
round  ; 

u  From  rich  and  rural  Worcester,  where  through  the  calm 

repose 

Of  cultured  vales  and  fringing  woods  the  gentle  Nashua 
flows, 

*  Poetical  Works,  iii.,  80. 
18 


194     JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIER 

To  where  Wachuset's  wintry  blasts  the  mountain  larches 

stir, 
Swelled  up  to  Heaven  the  thrilling  cry  of  '  God  save 

Latimer  ! ' 

"  And  sandy  Barnstable  rose  up,  wet  with  the  salt  sea 

spray  ; 
And  Bristol  sent  her  answering  shout  down  Narragansett 

Bay! 

Along  the  broad  Connecticut  old  Harapdenfelt  the  thrill, 
And  the  cheer  of  Hampshire's  woodmen  swept  down  from 

Holyoke  Hill. 

"  The  voice  of  Massachusetts  !  Of  her  free  sons  and  daugh 
ters, 

Deep  calling  unto  deep  aloud,  the  sound  of  many  waters  ! 
Against  the  burden  of  that  voice  what  tyrant  power  shall 

stand  ? 
No  fetters  in  the  Bay  State !     No  slave  upon  her  land  !  " 

At  forty-nine,  when  the  elections  of  1856  had 
shown  the  gains  of  the  Free-Soil  party,  he  wrote 
this : * 

"  For  God  be  praised  !  New  England 

Takes  once  more  her  ancient  place  ; 
Again  the  Pilgrim's  banner 
Leads  the  vanguard  of  the  race. 

"  The  Northern  hills  are  blazing, 

The  Northern  skies  are  bright ; 
The  fair  young  West  is  turning 
Her  forehead  to  the  light  ! 


*  "  A  Song ;  "  Poetical  Works,  iii.,  193. 


JOHN   GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER     195 

"Push  every  outpost  nearer, 

Press  hard  the  hostile  towers ! 
Another  Balaklava, 
And  the  Malakoff  is  ours  !  " 

The  tide  was  turning.  Four  years  later  came 
the  war.  Here  is  a  bit  of  his  first  war  poem  :  * 

u  We  see  not,  know  not ;  all  our  way 
Is  night — with  Thee  alone  is  day  : 
From  out  the  torrent's  troubled  drift, 
Above  the  storm  our  prayers  we  lift, 
Thy  will  be  done  ! 

11  Strike,  Thou  the  Master,  we  Thy  keys, 
The  anthem  of  the  destinies  ! 
The  minor  of  Thy  loftier  strain, 
Our  hearts  shall  breathe  the  old  refrain, 
Thy  will  be  done  !  " 

"Barbara  Frietchie"f  every  one  knows— per 
haps  the  most  instantly  popular  ballad  of  the 
war.  "  Laus  Deo  !  "  J  in  celebration  of  the  con 
stitutional  abolition  of  slavery,  is  not  so  familiar. 
Every  word  of  that  should  be  read,  too.  Hero 

are  a  few  : 

ultis  done! 

Clang  of  bell  and  roar  of  gun 
Send  the  tidings  up  and  down. 
How  the  belfries  rock  and  reel ! 
How  the  great  guns,  peal  on  peal, 
Fling  the  joy  from  town  to  town  ! 

*  "Thy  Will  be  Done ;  "  Poetical  Works,  iii.,  217. 
t  Poetical  Works,  iii.,  245.  J  Ibid.,  254. 


196     JOHN   GREENLEAF   WHITTIER 

"Did  we  dare, 

In  our  agony  of  prayer, 
Ask  for  more  than  He  has  done  ? 

When  was  ever  His  right  hand 

Over  any  time  or  land 
Stretched  as  now  beneath  the  sun  ? 

"  Ring  and  swing, 
Bells  of  joy  !    On  morning's  wing 

Send  the  song  of  praise  abroad  ! 
With  a  sound  of  broken  chains 
Tell  the  nations  that  He  reigns, 

Who  alone  is  Lord  and  God  !  " 

These  few  extracts  must  suffice  to  represent 
the  most  earnest  work  he  did  for  above  thirty 
years.  With  more  intensity,  with  genuine  pas 
sion,  they  show  the  same  sincerity,  the  same  sim 
plicity  that  we  have  felt  in  him  throughout. 
And  he  knew  the  rare  happiness  of  complete  con 
quest.  Beginning  with  all  the  world  against  him, 
he  found  himself  for  the  last  twenty  years  of  his 
life  in  a  world  where  all  were  against  his  foes. 


XI 

IN  view  of  this,  we  may  well  pause  to  consider 
two  extracts  from  his  writings — one  in  prose  and 
one  in  verse — without  which  our  impression  of 
him  would  be  seriously  incomplete.  They  show 
that  he  possessed  the  power  which  is  perhaps  the 
test  of  manly  greatness — the  power  of  serenely 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIEK      197 

recognizing  the  worth   of  men  from  whom  for 
years  he  honestly  and  passionately  differed. 

The  first  is  from  a  letter  of  regret  that  he  could 
not  attend  a  meeting  in  memory  of  Edward  Ev 
erett  :  * 

"  When  the  grave  closed  over  him  who  added  new  lustre 
to  the  old  and  honoured  name  of  Quincy,  all  eyes  instinc 
tively  turned  to  Edward  Everett  as  the  last  of  that  vener 
ated  class  of  patriotic  civilians  who,  outliving  all  dissent 
and  jealousy  and  party  prejudice,  held  their  reputation  by 
the  secure  tenure  of  the  universal  appreciation  of  its 
worth  as  a  common  treasure  of  the  republic.  It  is  not  for 
me  to  pronounce  his  eulogy.  .  .  .  My  secluded  country 
life  has  afforded  me  i'ew  opportunities  of  personal  inter 
course  with  him,  while  my  pronounced  radicalism  on  the 
great  question  which  has  divided  popular  feeling  rendered 
our  political  paths  widely  divergent.  Both  of  us  early 
saw  the  danger  which  threatened  the  country.  .  .  . 
But  while  he  believed  in  the  possibility  of  averting  it 
by  concession  and  compromise,  I,  on  the  contrary,  as 
firmly  believed  that  such  a  course  could  only  strengthen 
and  confirm  what  I  regarded  as  a  gigantic  conspiracy 
against  the  rights  and  liberties,  the  union  and  the  life, 
of  the  nation.  .  . 

"Recent  events  have  certainly  not  tended  to  change 
this  belief  on  my  part ;  but  in  looking  over  the  past, 
while  I  see  little  or  nothing  to  retract  in  the  matter  of 
opinion,  I  am  saddened  by  the  reflection  that  through  the 
very  intensity  of  my  convictions  I  may  have  done  injus 
tice  to  the  motives  of  those  with  whom  I  differed.  As 
respects  Edward  Everett,  it  seems  to  me  that  only  within 
the  last  four  years  t  I  have  truly  known  him." 

*  Prose  Works,  ii. ,  274.     Written  in  1865. 

t  These,  w.?  must  remember,  were  the  years  of  the  war. 


198     JOHN  GBEENLEAF  WHITTIER 

Fifteen  years  before  lie  wrote  this  letter,  he 
had  written  concerning  Webster's  Seventh- of - 
March  Speech  the  scathing  invective  which  he 
named  "  Ichabod  :  " 

' '  So  fallen  !  so  lost !  the  light  withdrawn 

Which  once  he  wore  ! 
The  glory  from  his  grey  hairs  gone 
For  evermore ! 

"  Let  not  the  land  once  proud  of  him 

Insult  him  now, 

Nor  brand  with  deeper  shame  the  dim, 
Dishonoured  brow. 

"  But  let  its  humbled  sons,  instead, 

From  sea  to  lake, 

A  long  lament,  as  for  the  dead, 

In  sadness  make. 

"  Then  pay  the  reverence  of  old  days 

To  his  dead  fame  ; 
Walk  backward,  with  averted  gaze, 
And  hide  the  shame  !  " 

Fifteen  years  after  Edward  Everett's  death,  and 
thirty  years  after  this  "Ichabod"  had  seen  the 
light,  Wliittier  wrote  of  Webster  once  more.  In 
his  collected  works  he  departs  for  once  from 
chronology,  and  puts  beside  "  Ichabod  "  his  final 
poem  on  Webster — the  "  Lost  Occasion  :  "  f 

*  Poetical  Works,  iv.,  62.  t  Ibid.,  03. 


JOHN  GKEENLEAF  WHITTIER      199 

4  Thou  shouldst  have  lived  to  feel  below 
Thy  feet  Disunion's  fierce  upthrow  ; 
The  late-sprung  mine  that  underlaid 
Thy  sad  concessions  vainly  made. 
Thou  shouldst  have  seen  from  Sumter's  wall 
The  star-flag  of  the  Union  fall, 
And  armed  rebellion  pressing  on 
The  broken  lines  of  Washington  ! 
No  stronger  voice  than  thine  had  then 
Called  out  the  utmost  might  of  men, 
To  make  the  Union's  charter  free 
And  strengthen  law  by  liberty. 

Wise  men  and  strong  we  did  not  lack  ; 
But  still,  with  memory  turning  back, 
In  the  dark  hours  we  thought  of  thee, 
And  thy  lone  grave  beside  the  sea. 

But,  where  thy  native  mountains  bare 

Their  foreheads  to  diviner  air, 

Fit  emblem  of  enduring  fame, 

One  lofty  summit  keeps  thy  name. 

For  thee  the  cosmic  forces  did 

The  rearing  of  that  pyramid, 

The  prescient  ages  shaping  with 

Fire,  flood,  and  frost  thy  monolith. 

Sunrise  and  sunset  lay  thereon 

With  hands  of  light  their  benison, 

The  stars  of  midnight  pause  to  set 

Their  jewels  in  its  coronet. 

And  evermore  that  mountain  mass 

Seems  climbing  from  the  shadowy  pass 

To  light,  as  if  to  manifest 

Thy  nobler  self,  thy  life  at  best !  " 


200     JOHN  GREENLEAF   WHITTIEK 

Is  it  too  much  to  see  in  these  lines  not  an  as 
sent  but  an  approach  to  that  view  of  the  Seventh- 
of-March  Speech  which  some,  of  the  younger 
generation,  are  beginning  to  take?  that  it  may 
have  been  not  what  men  thought  it  at  the  time — 
a  blind  sacrifice  of  principle  to  self ;  but  rather 
the  most  nobly  patriotic  act  of  a  nobly  patriotic 
career— a  deliberate  sacrifice  of  self  to  the  Union 
which  without  such  sacrifice  was  not  yet  strong 
enough  to  survive  ? 


XII 


BUT  this  is  not  the  place  for  political  specula 
tion.  I  have  tried  to  show  Whittier  as  he  was, 
extenuating  nothing  nor  setting  down  aught  in 
malice.  Above  most  men,  he  was  one  who  can 
stand  the  test.  His  faults  are  patent.  One  can 
not  read  him  long  without  forgetting  them  in 
admiration  of  his  nobly  simple  merits.  Before 
considering  his  work  in  detail,  I  suggested  that 
his  chance  of  survival  is  better  than  that  of  any 
other  contemporary  American  man  of  letters. 
Our  consideration  of  his  work  has  perhaps  shown 
why.  In  the  first  place,  he  has  recorded  in  a  way 
as  yet  unapproached  the  homely  beauties  of  New 
England  Nature.  In  the  second,  he  accepted  with 
all  his  heart  the  traditional  democratic  principles 
of  equality  and  freedom  which  have  always  ani 
mated  the  people  of  New  England.  These  prin- 


JOHN  GREENLEAF  WHITTIEK      201 

ciples.  he  uttered  in  words  whose  simplicity  goes 
straight  to  the  hearts  of  the  whole  American  peo 
ple.  Whether  these  principles  be  true  or  false  is 
no  concern  of  ours  here.  If  our  republic  is  to  live, 
they  are  the  principles  which  must  prevail.  And 
in  the  verses  of  Whittier  they  are  preserved  to 
guide  posterity,  in  the  words  of  one  who  was  in 
capable  of  falsehood. 


VII 
MR  LOWELL  AS  A  TEACHER 


[Published  in  Scrttner's  Magazine,  November,  1891.] 


MR,   LOWELL   AS   A  TEACHEE 


As  a  student  in  Harvard  College  during  the 
years  1876  and  1877— the  last  two  years  of  Mr. 
Lowell's  regular  teaching  there — I  had  the  fort 
une  to  be  his  pupil.  My  memories  of  him,  in  a 
character  not  generally  known,  are  perhaps  worth 
recording. 

II 

In  my  Junior  year,  a  lecture  of  Professor  Nor 
ton's  excited  in  me  a  wish  to  read  Dante  under 
Mr.  Lowell.  I  did  not  know  a  word  of  Italian, 
though;  and  I  was  firmly  resolved  to  waste  no 
more  time  on  elementary  grammar.  Without, 
much  hope  of  a  favourable  reception,  then,  I  ap 
plied  for  admission  to  the  course.  Mr.  Lowell  re 
ceived  me  in  one  of  the  small  recitation -rooms  in 
the  upper  story  of  University  Hall.  My  first  im 
pression  was  that  he  was  surprisingly  hirsute,  and 
a  little  eccentric  in  aspect.  He  wore  a  double- 
breasted  sack-coat,  by  no  means  new.  In  his  neck 
tie,  which  was  tied  in  a  sailor-knot,  was  a  pin — an 
article  of  adornment  at  that  time  recently  con- 


206  LOWELL 

demned  by  an  authority  which  some  of  us  were 
then  disposed  to  accept  as  gospel.  On  his  desk 
lay  a  silk  hat  not  lately  brushed ;  and  nobody,  I 
then  held,  had  any  business  to  wear  a  silk  hat  un 
less  he  wore  coat-tails,  too. 

My  second  impression,  which  was  fixed  the 
moment  he  looked  at  me,  and  which  has  never 
altered,  was  that  I  had  never  met  anybody  quite 
so  quizzical.  Naturally  I  was  not  exactly  at  ease  ; 
and  Mr.  Lowell  appeared  to  take  a  repressed  but 
boyish  delight  in  keeping  me  a  bit  uneasy.  He 
listened  to  my  application  kindly,  though ;  and 
finally,  with  a  gesture  that  I  remember  as  very 
like  a  stretch,  told  me  to  come  in  to  the  course 
and  see  what  I  could  do  with  Dante. 

To  that  time  my  experience  of  academic  teach 
ing  had  led  me  to  the  belief  that  the  only  way  to 
study  a  classic  text  in  any  language  was  to  scru 
tinize  every  syllable  with  a  care  undisturbed  by 
consideration  of  any  more  of  the  context  than  was 
grammatically  related  to  it.  Any  real  reading  I 
had  done,  I  had  had  to  do  without  a  teacher.  Mr. 
Lowell  never  gave  us  less  than  a  canto  to  read ; 
and  often  gave  us  two  or  three.  He  never,  from 
the  beginning,  bothered  us  with  a  particle  of  lin 
guistic  irrelevance.  Here  before  us  was  a  great 
poem — a  lasting  expression  of  what  human  life 
had  meant  to  a  human  being,  dead  and  gone 
these  five  centuries.  Let  us  try,  as  best  we 
might,  to  see  what  life  had  meant  to  this  man ; 


LOWELL  207 

let  us  see  what  relation  his  experience,  great  and 
small,  bore  to  ours;  and,  now  and  then,  let  us 
pause  for  a  moment  to  notice  how  wonderfully 
beautiful  his  expression  of  this  experience  was. 
Let  us  read,  as  sympathetically  as  we  could  make 
ourselves  read,  the  words  of  one  who  was  as  much 
a  man  as  we  ;  only  vastly  greater  in  his  knowledge 
of  wisdom  and  of  beauty.  That  was  the  spirit  of 
Mr.  Lowell's  teaching.  It  opened  to  some  of  us 
a  new  world.  In  a  month,  I  could  read  Dante 
better  than  I  ever  learned  to  read  Greek,  or  Latin, 
or  German. 

His  method  of  teaching  was  all  his  own.  The 
class  was  small — not  above  ten  or  a  dozen ;  and 
he  generally  began  by  making  each  student  trans 
late  a  few  lines,  interrupting  now  and  then  with 
suggestions  of  the  poetic  value  of  passages  which 
were  being  rendered  in  a  style  too  exasperatingly 
prosaic.  Now  and  again,  some  word  or  some  pas 
sage  would  suggest  to  him  a  line  of  thought — 
sometimes  very  earnest,  sometimes  paradoxically 
comical — that  it  would  never  have  suggested  to 
anyone  else.  And  he  would  lean  back  in  his 
chair,  and  talk  away  across  country  till  he  felt 
like  stopping ;  or  he  would  thrust  his  hands  into 
the  pockets  of  his  rather  shabby  sack-coat,  and 
pace  the  end  of  the  room  with  his  heavy  laced 
boots,  and  look  at  nothing  in  particular,  and  dis 
course  of  things  in  general.  Wo  gave  up  note 
books  in  a  week.  Our  business  was  not  to  cram 


208  LOWELL 

lifeless  detail,  but  to  absorb  as  much  as  we  might 
of  the  spirit  of  his  exuberant  literary  vitality. 
And  through  it  all  he  was  always  a  quiz  ;  you 
never  knew  what  he  was  going  to  do  or  to  say 
next.  One  whimsical  digression  I  have  always 
remembered,  chiefly  for  the  amiable  atrocity  of 
the  pun.  Some  mention  of  wings  had  been  made 
in  the  text,  whereupon  Mr.  Lowell  observed  that 
he  had  always  had  a  liking  for  wings :  he  had 
lately  observed  that  some  were  being  added  to  the 
ugliest  house  in  Cambridge,  and  he  cherished 
hopes  that  they  might  fly  away  with  it.  I  remem 
ber,  too,  how  one  tremendous  passage  in  the 
"Inferno"  started  him  off  in  a  disquisition  con 
cerning  canker-worms,  and  other  less  mentionable 
— if  more  diverting — vermin.  And  then,  all  of  a 
sudden,  he  soared  up  into  the  clouds,  and  pounced 
down  on  the  text  again,  and  asked  the  next  man 
to  translate.  You  could  not  always  be  sure  when 
he  was  in  earnest ;  but  there  was  never  a  moment 
when  he  let  you  forget  that  you  were  a  human  be 
ing  in  a  human  world,  and  that  Dante  had  been 
one,  too.  One  or  two  of  us,  among  ourselves, 
nicknamed  him  "sweet  wag;"  I  like  the  name 
still. 

After  a  month  or  two,  he  found  that  we  were 
not  advancing  fast  enough.  So  he  fell  into  a  way 
of  making  us  read  one  canto  to  him,  and  then 
reading  the  next  to  us.  If  we  wished  to  interrupt 
him,  we  were  as  free  to  do  so  as  he  was  to  inter- 


LOWELL  209 

rupt  us.  There  was  one  man  in  the  class,  I  re 
member,  who  liked  to  read  out-of-the-way  books, 
and  who  used  to  break  in  on  Mr.  Lowell's  trans 
lation  with  questions  about  Gabriel  Harvey  and 
other  such  worthies,  rather  humorously  copying 
Mr.  Lowell's  own  irrelevancies ;  but  he  could 
never  get  hold  of  anything  so  out  of  the  way  that 
Mr.  Lowell  had  not  read  it,  or  at  least  could  not 
talk  about  it  as  easily  as  if  he  had  read  it  often. 
So,  in  a  single  college  year,  we  read  through  the 
Divine  Comedy,  and  the  Vita  Nuova ;  and  dipped 
into  the  Convito  and  the  lesser  writings  of  Dante. 
And  more  than  one  of  us  learned  to  love  them  al 
ways. 

Ill 

THIS  class-room  work,  however,  was  to  some  of 
us  the  least  important  part  of  Mr.  Lowell's  teach 
ing.  Almost  as  soon  as  the  year  began,  he  an 
nounced  that  he  should  always  be  at  home  one 
evening  in  the  week,  and  glad  to  see  us.  Several 
of  us  took  him  at  his  word,  and  even  took  his 
word  to  signify  more  than  the  good  man  ever 
meant  it  to.  For  if  the  evening  he  set  aside  for 
us  proved  inconvenient,  we  made  no  scruple  of 
going  to  Elmwood  at  other  times;  and  if  Mr. 
Lowell  was  at  home — as  he  generally  was  in  those 
years— we  were  always  admitted. 

It  is  those  evenings  with  him  in  his  library  that 
one  remembers  best.  There  was  always  a  wood- 
14 


210  LOWELL 

fire  burning  above  a  bed  of  ashes  which  had  been 
accumulating  for  years.  He  would  generally  sit  at 
one  side  of  the  fire,  within  easy  reach  of  the  tongs, 
which  he  often  plied  as  he  talked.  What  is  more, 
when  some  of  us  grew  more  familiar  and  ventured 
to  ply  the  tongs  ourselves,  he  would  not  interfere. 
He  would  always  be  rather  carelessly  dressed :  a 
loose  smoking-jacket,  I  think,  and  often  slippers. 
And  he  would  smoke  a  pipe.  He  would  generally 
begin  the  evening  by  offering  one  a  cigar.  My 
impression,  I  remember,  was  that  the  cigar  was 
always  the  same,  and  for  some  months  I  did  not 
dare  accept  it.  Finally,  I  summoned  courage  to 
smoke  it,  and  found  it  very  dry  and  the  wrapper 
cracked;  which  went  far  to  confirm  my  impres 
sion.  But  one  did  not  care  about  that  sort  of 
thing.  His  pipe  fairly  started,  Mr.  Lowell  would 
begin  to  talk,  in  his  own  quizzical  way — at  one 
moment  beautifully  in  earnest,  at  the  next  so 
whimsical  that  you  could  not  quite  make  out  what 
he  meant — about  whatever  came  into  his  head. 
It  might  be  what  he  had  just  been  reading ;  he 
had  generally  just  been  reading  some  bit  of  old 
literature — once  I  remember  finding  him  deep  in 
a  narrative  in  the  Apocrypha,  which  lie  went  on 
reading  aloud.  It  might  be  the  news  of  the  day, 
it  might  be  reminiscence  of  any  kind.  All  we 
had  to  do  was  to  sit  and  listen,  which  was  far  bet 
ter  than  any  other  way  of  spending  an  evening 
known  to  me  in  those  davs.  To  talk  to  him  was 


LOWELL  211 

hard.  A  man  to  whom  people  have  liked  to  lis 
ten  these  thirty  years  rarely  remains  a  good  list 
ener  to  things  like  undergraduate  chatter,  which 
are  not  worth  serious  attention.  But  when  he  did 
listen,  and  when  he  talked,  too,  he  did  so — no 
matter  how  quizzically— with  a  certain  politeness 
that  at  the  time  seemed  to  me,  and  in  memory  re 
mains,  a  typical  example  of  the  signification  of 
the  word  urbane;  and  all  this  in  smoking- jacket 
and  slippers,  by  lamp-light,  before  a  flickering 
wood-fire  whose  ashes  were  crumbling  down  into  a 
great  bed  which  had  grown  from  hundreds  of  such 
fires  before. 

The  human  friendliness  of  those  evenings,  who 
ever  knew  them  cannot  forget.  To  some  of  us  it 
gave  a  new  meaning  to  everything  he  touched,  in 
teaching  or  in  talk.  Here  was  a  man  who  faced 
great  things  and  little  undismayed ;  who  found 
in  literature  not  something  gravely  mysterious, 
but  only  the  best  record  that  human  beings  have 
made  of  human  life  ;  who  found,  too,  in  human 
life — old  and  new — not  something  to  be  disdained 
with  the  serene  contempt  of  smug  scholarship, 
but  the  everlasting  material  from  which  literature 
and  art  are  made.  Here  was  a  man,  you  grew  to 
feel,  who  knew  literature,  and  knew  the  world, 
and  knew  you,  too ;  ready  and  willing,  in  a 
friendly  way,  to  speak  the  word  of  cordial  intro 
duction.  There  came  from  those  evenings  a  cer 
tain  feeling  of  personal  affection  for  him,  very 


212  LOWELL 

rare  in  any  student's  experience  of  even  the  most 
faithful  teacher. 

Yet,  faithful  as  his  work  was  in  spirit,  he  hated 
the  details  of  it,  and  sometimes  treated  them  with 
a  whimsical  disregard  that  whoever  did  not  ap 
preciate  how  thoroughly  it  put  them  where  they 
belonged  might  have  deemed  cynically  indiffer 
ent.  I  remember  an  example  of  this  in  connec 
tion  with  an  examination — I  believe  the  first  ho 
gave  us.  There  are  few  things  less  favourable  to 
literary  culture  than  written  examinations  ;  they 
are  almost  unmitigated,  if  quite  necessary,  evils. 
Perhaps  from  unwillingness  to  degrade  the  text 
of  Dante  to  such  use,  Mr.  Lowell  set  us,  when  we 
had  read  the  Inferno  and  part  of  the  Purgatorio, 
a  paper  consisting  of  nothing  but  a  long  passage 
from  Massimo  d'  Azeglio,  which  we  had  three 
hours  to  translate.  This  task  we  performed  as 
best  we  might.  Weeks  passed,  and  no  news  came 
of  our  marks.  At  last  one  of  the  class,  who  was 
not  quite  at  ease  concerning  his  academic  stand 
ing,  ventured,  at  the  close  of  a  recitation,  to  ask 
if  Mr.  Lowell  had  assigned  him  a  mark.  Mr. 
Lowell  looked  at  the  youth  very  gravely,  and  in 
quired  what  he  really  thought  his  work  deserved. 
The  student  rather  diffidently  said  that  he  hoped 
it  was  worth  sixty  per  cent.  "You  may  take  it," 
said  Mr.  Lowell ;  "  and  I  shan't  have  the  bother 
of  reading  your  book." 

I  remember  two  or  three  instances  of  the  curi- 


LOWELL  213 

cms  friendliness  which  by  and  by  sprang  up  be 
tween  him  and  his  pupils.  At  that  time  the  stu 
dents  were  publishing  a  paper  which  contained 
likenesses  of  the  faculty,  imitated — at  the  longest 
of  intervals — from  Vanity  Fair.  When  a  por 
trait  of  Mr.  Lowell  appeared,  with  his  sack-coat, 
and  his  silk  hat,  and  his  heavy  boots  all  duly  em 
phasised,  somebody  ventured  to  ask  him  how  he 
liked  it.  To  which  he  replied  that  he  had  been 
grieved  to  observe  that  the  artist  had  allowed  a 
handkerchief  to  protrude  from  his  breast-pocket ; 
but  had  been  consoled  by  the  fact  that  the  artist 
had  kindly  permitted  him  to  wear  plaid  trousers 
— an  innocent  fancy  of  his  to  which  Mrs.  Lowell 
strongly  objected. 

Another,  very  different,  example  of  his  way  of 
treating  us  appeared  one  evening,  when  I  went 
alone  to  call  at  Elmwood,  and  found  him  alone  in 
his  library.  I  had  never  seen  him  so  stern  in  as 
pect,  so  absent  in  manner.  In  a  moment  he  told 
me  why.  He  had  just  heard  of  the  death  of  a 
dear  friend.  Of  course  I  rose  to  go,  but  he  de 
tained  me  ;  it  would  do  him  good,  he  said,  to 
talk.  I  have  always  wished  that  I  had  written 
down  what  I  remembered  of  the  talk  that  fol 
lowed,  for  it  still  seems  to  me  that  I  have  never 
heard  another  so  memorable;  but  all  that  re 
mains  with  me  now  is  the  very  beginning. 
There  is  one  blessed  comfort,  he  said,  that  comes 
with  death  ;  then,  at  last,  wo  can  begin,  with  cer- 


214  LOWELL 

tainty  of  no  awaking  disenchantment,  to  idealise 
those  we  love.  It  is  the  dead,  unbodied  Beatrice 
who  lives  for  ever  in  the  lines  of  Dante.  We  can 
watch  among  our  friends  the  growth  of  their  own 
Beatrices  that  such  as  have  had  the  happiness  to 
know  them  make  amid  the  agonies  of  bereave 
ment,  each  for  himself.  This  friend  of  his  own, 
just  dead,  was  already  gathering  to  herself  the  un 
mixed  gloriea  of  the  ideality  which  would  gather 
about  her  as  long  as  those  who  loved  her  should 
live  to  know  it. — And  so  he  talked  on,  rambling 
far  and  wide>  not  forgetting  now  and  then  the 
whimsicality  without  which  his  talk  would  not 
have  been  his,  nor  ever  forgetting  either  the  deep 
gravity  of  the  mood  in  which  I  had  found  him. 
That  talk  was  such  a  poem  as  I  have  never  read. 
When  at  last  I  left  him,  he  took  my  hand  more 
warmly  than  ever  before.  It  had  done  him  good, 
that  silent  greeting  said,  to  talk,  to  have  any 
listener. 

The  feeling  of  personal  regard  which  came  from 
such  intercourse  as  this  was  different  from  any 
thing  else  I  knew  as  a  student.  You  felt,  at  last, 
in  spite  of  all  his  quizzical  whimsicality,  a  sen 
timent  of  intimacy,  of  confidence,  of  familiarity 
which  no  one  else  excited.  You  felt  instinctively 
that  such  a  feeling  must  be  mutual.  Mr.  Lowell 
was  a  celebrated  man,  of  course  ;  a  serious  figure 
in  American  literature.  But  at  that  moment, 
though  he  was  still  in  the  full  vigour  of  life,  his 


LOWELL  215 

work  seemed  pretty  well  over.  You  thought  of 
him  as  a  kind  old  friend,  resting  contemplatively 
before  his  wood-fire,  thinking  and  talking  of  all 
manner  of  human  things ;  and  waiting,  very 
serenely,  in  sack-coat  and  slippers,  for  the  far-off 
end  of  an  ideal  life  of  letters.  It  was  just  at  the 
end  of  my  second  year  of  study  with  him — a  year 
in  which  he  had  taught  me  almost  as  much  over 
the  text  of  Roland  and  other  dreary  old  French 
poems  as  he  had  taught  over  Dante  himself — 
that  the  news  came  that  he  was  going  to  Spain. 

IV 

I  HEARD  it,  I  think,  on  onr  Class-Day.  The 
class  had  distinguished  itself  by  an  internal 
squabble  which  had  prevented  the  election  of 
Class-Day  officers,  and  consequently  the  usual 
oration  and  poem,  and  so  on.  By  way  of  peace 
making,  perhaps,  Mr.  Lowell  had  invited  us  all 
to  an  open-air  breakfast  at  Elmwood,  at  the  hour 
when  formal  ceremonies  usually  make  the  begin 
ning  of  Class-Day  at  Harvard  so  remote  f^m 
amusing.  Few  of  tho  men  knew  him,  even  by 
sight ;  but  all  found  him  so  cordial  a  host  that 
for  the  moment  our  animosities  were  half  for 
gotten.  I  asked  him  if  the  report  of  his  mission 
were  true  ;  and  he  said  it  was.  I  remember  won 
dering  how  this  friendly,  careless,  whimsical,  hu 
man  man  of  letters,  who  had  seemed  so  perma- 


216  LOWELL 

nently  settled  in  his  arm-chair,  would  manage  the 
rather  serious  business  of  diplomatic  life ;  won 
dering,  with  true  boyish  impudence,  whether  he 
would  be  up  to  it.  After  that  day  I  did  not  see 
him  until  his  final  return  from  the  mission  to 
England. 

All  the  time  I  had  felt  as  if  such  intimate  per 
sonal  feeling  as  he  had  aroused  and  permitted 
must  have  been  mutual.  When  at  last  I  met  him 
again,  it  was  a  slight  shock  to  find  that  he  had 
quite  forgotten  my  face,  and  almost  forgotten 
my  name.  The  truth  was,  I  began  at  last  to  see, 
that  throughout  those  old  days  he  had  known 
better  than  any  of  us  what  dull,  fruitless  beings 
we  college  boys  were ;  but  that  his  business 
had  been  to  teach  us  all  he  could,  and  he  had 
known  that  he,  at  least,  could  teach  best  by  show 
ing  himself  to  us  as  he  was.  All  this  kindness, 
all  this  friendliness,  all  this  humanity  was  real ; 
all  the  culture  he  had  striven  to  impart  to  us  was 
as  precious  as  we  had  ever  thought  it.  We  our 
selves,  though,  were  mere  passing  figures,  not 
worth  very  serious  personal  memory ;  and  Mr. 
Lowell  valued  people  at  their  true  worth,  and  was 
beautifully  free  from  that  clerical  kind  of  humbug 
which  presses  your  hand  after  an  interval  of  years, 
and  asks  feelingly  for  the  dear  children  it  has 
never  bothered  its  wits  about.  And  the  fact  that 
all  he  had  been  to  us  and  all  he  had  done  for  us 
had  been  his  honest,  earnest  work  as  a  teacher, 


LOWELL  217 

and  not  his  spontaneous  conduct  as  a  human  be 
ing,  makes  it  seem  now  all  the  more  admirable. 
I  have  often  shuddered  to  think  how  we  must 
have  bored  him ;  I  have  never  ceased  more  and 
more  to  admire  the  faithful  persistency  with 
which  he  inspired  us. 

The  last  time  I  spoke  to  him  was  on  his  seven 
tieth  birthday.  A  public  dinner  had  been  given 
him,  and  in  the  speeches  his  public  life  and 
works  had  been  rehearsed  from  beginning  to  end ; 
but  not  a  word  had  been  said  of  his  teaching. 
After  dinner  I  told  him  that  this  omission  had 
meant  much  to  me,  that  to  me  he  would  always 
be  chiefly  the  most  inspiring  teacher  I  had  ever 
had.  His  face  lighted  with  the  old  quizzical 
smile,  and  I  could  not  tell  quite  how  much  he 
was  in  earnest  when,  with  all  the  old  urbanity,  he 
answered  :  "  I'm  glad  you  said  that.  I've  been 
wondering  if  I  hadn't  wasted  half  my  life." 


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